What is a Good WTSD in Poker?

What the stat counts

WTSD is the share of hands where you went to showdown after seeing the flop. The denominator is the detail that trips people up: it is flops seen, not hands dealt. A hand you folded preflop never enters the calculation, so a nit and a maniac can post the same WTSD for completely different reasons — the nit sees few flops and takes a large share of them to the end, the maniac sees many and folds most of them on the way. It also counts a showdown however it arrived, so an all-in on the flop and three streets of check-calling are the same event.

Why the band is where it is

The 22-30% band describes a player who folds their worst hands early and keeps their best ones to the end. Roughly a quarter of the flops you see reaching a showdown is what that looks like: most hands miss most flops, so most hands end before the river, and the ones that survive three streets of betting are a minority by construction. The band is 8 points wide, which is narrow, and that is a genuine claim about the stat rather than an accident: WTSD is the sum of a great many small decisions, so it moves less than the decisions that make it up. Two players inside the band can still be playing very differently — one folding flops and calling rivers, the other the reverse — and the number cannot tell them apart.

What pushes it out of the band

Above 30% you are paying to see too many hands. This figure almost never travels alone: it usually comes with a fold-versus-c-bet number under its own 35-60% band, because calling flops you should fold is what produces extra showdowns. The river is where it costs most, since the pot is biggest and the bluffs are rarest. Below 22% you are folding hands that had enough to continue, and the expensive version is over-folding rivers to a population that does not bluff enough to justify it. The diagnosis, in both directions, is the same exercise: find the street where the hands are leaving. A stats report will point at it faster than memory will.

Read it with W$SD

WTSD says how often you get to showdown; W$SD, guideline 48-56%, says how often you win when you do. The combinations are what carry information:

• •High WTSD, low W$SD — the classic call-down habit. You are arriving with hands that are not good enough, which is a folding problem on earlier streets rather than bad luck at the end.
• •Low WTSD, high W$SD — you only get there with the near-nuts. Safe, and it leaks value: the hands you folded on the turn were often the best hand.
• •Both inside the bands — the shape of a player who is folding the right hands early and not paying off at the end. It is also the least interesting result, which is the point of a benchmark.

How long before your own figure means anything

WTSD needs about 460 flops seen before a 95% interval on it is narrower than the 4-point half-width of the band. If you see a flop on roughly 24% of hands — the VPIP band's midpoint — that is about 1,900 hands. An opponent's WTSD over a hundred hands is worth nothing at all: at that sample the interval is wider than the entire band, which means the number is compatible with every strategy at the table.

Check your own figure

The free leak report computes WTSD and W$SD together from your hand history and marks both against these bands, which is the only way the pair becomes a read rather than two numbers. It also reports the fold-versus-c-bet figure that usually explains a WTSD outside the band.