How to tell whether a Pokémon Card is fake or not
The best way to tell a real Pokémon card from a fake one is to compare it to one you know for sure is real

The YouTube web series "Bootleg Zone" did an episode on bootleg Pokémon cards and compared them to real ones. Consider this picture of a Professor Oak card. One of the English ones is fake and the other is real. Can you tell which one?



The middle one is the bootleg, but it's a pretty good imitation. By comparing it to the real one, you'll notice that the color is off a bit, but without knowing the correct shade, you can't tell. The bootleg also has some blurry text at the bottom, but that's tough to spot.

Of course, sometimes it's painfully obvious to any Pokémon fan.


I especially love how Gyardos is a Fire Horse Pokémon, and that these are rare 2nd Edition cards!

The full video shows lots of other examples, but the difference between a real card and a bootleg really ranges between "blatantly obvious mistake" or "almost imperceptible difference from the original". Some examples of tells were:


Slight miscolorations
Blurry text
Text in a different font
Text with different line breaks
A different card feel (paper quality, etc)
A different style of holographic film, especially one that goes all the way to the edge of the card (most holographic real cards are only on the Pokémon portrait)
A different card size
Being part of a set that it wasn't originally part of (e.g. a card with the Neo Genesis icon when it was really part of the Jungle set)
Blatantly wrong information (e.g. Bellsprout evolving into Mewtwo)


In most of these cases, comparing it to a real card is the best way to tell if it's fake. There is the official Pokémon Trading Card Database, which will help you spot any text or stat differences, but isn't great for differentiating colors (since your monitor may not precisely match the colors a printed card would appear in your room), and of course it can't help you with determining the feel of the card.

That said, if you got a pack of cards and some of them have obvious typos, I'd be surprised if the rest were legitimate.