Piètre doesn’t work well here (too formal and outdated) but minable and pauvre are fine:
juste une pauvre petite paire
juste une paire minable
Here are other suggestions:
juste une petite paire de rien du tout
juste une petite paire ridicule
As a native French speaker I would not use any of these adjectives but rather say:
… juste une misérable paire.
Misérable is a false friend and doesn’t mean sad but “really poor and weak”. It can be applied to humans (c.f. les miserables) but also to object/situations, where it often contains a bit of irony:
Tu ne vas pas aller loin avec tes 3 misérables euros.
It is thus fine to express the weakness of a poker hand.
Leave a comment