Basic Strategy: Counterfeiting In Poker
by Dougie Goguen | Dec 1 2011
You've probably never heard of counterfeiting in poker, but it's something that happens and you should be aware of.
OK, right off the bat, I have to say that "counterfeiting" is a poor term because it sounds illegal. It's not; it's just something that pops up occasionally at the poker table and all new players need to learn what it is and how to deal with it. You are counterfeited when a community card comes into play that makes one or more of your hole cards redundant without changing the basic value of your hand.
Play free online poker at Bodog today!Despite the value of your hand changing, counterfeiting is usually a sign that you're going to end up losing money or not getting as much if you hadn't been counterfeited.
Let's say you're holding 4h5d and you're late in the rotation and you decide to play these connectors. The board hits and it's 4c5sAd. The river is Th. You've got the bottom two pair and you may well be on your way to winning, but the river hits and it's Ts. This means your pair of fours is now completely redundant because of the overpair on the board.
The ten on the river has counterfeited your pair of 4s, and now everyone has access to the TT that's out there. You've lost the advantage that using both of your hole cards to make that original two-pair gave you. If you were facing down someone with KA that you could have beaten before with your two pair, that's not the case now.
Many amateur players get way, way too attached to their pocket cards and they end up completely ignoring the fact that counterfeiting has hurt their hand. This has happened to me multiple time before and you need to learn how to take the current strength of your hand at any given time and make decisions around that, not what you had before.
Bodog’s online poker tournaments give you more bang for your buy-in!Counterfeiting happens most frequently in games like Omaha Hi Lo and PLO because players are given more cards at any given time and they're forced to use two hole cards when playing. You can't control or prevent counterfeiting when you're playing poker, but you can minimize the amount of damage it does to your hand by cutting your losses when you see someone pushing after you've been hit with the redundancy.
