In poker, there is a term for situations where a small pair becomes useless when a third pair hits the board.
For instance, I have a pair of 6s, and the flop comes J 8 8. Now I have two pair, but a jack comes in the turn. I still have two pair, but so does everyone else! Unless another 6 comes on the river, my pocket pair is useless.
Yup, it’s called getting counterfeited:
Yes! Thank you!
I just could not dredge that up from my memory.
If you want to play a low pocket pair, you bet heavy pre-flop. The intention is to remove as many players as possible to prevent someone hitting on the flop and having a higher pair.
When the flop comes and you suddenly have 2 pair, you should be betting like a maniac and playing the odds that the two or three people left in the hand don’t have an 8 or a J.
Or alternately, you “set-mine.” The odds against flopping a set in Texas Hold-'Em are roughly 7.5 to one, and if you flop your set, it’s likely to be the best hand. Therefore, a player may have direct odds to call a pre-flop bet if there is a lot of money already in the pot, and for no-limit and pot-limit games, will probably have implied odds to call a pre-flop bet.
When playing low pocket pairs, and assuming I’m not in a stack to blind ratio regime where I am trying to win the hand by my pre-flop hand strength alone (see things like push-fold strategies and Nash equilibrium for more) I am playing them passively and trying to hit my set on the flop. The strategy of playing pairs aggressively strikes me as more appropriate for large pocket pairs where such hands do play much easier against fewer opponents.
But there’s often more than one path to get to the same goal in poker.