"The Myth of Any Two Cards": bad example situations?

[creedofhubris]

I am not primarily a tourney player, but I'm really skeptical of the examples the author selected. In both examples his opponent makes a weak play by calling an allin raise very lightly, and the author uses those opponents to show that "restealing" with a very wide range can be dangerous. Against an opponent who calls light, of course restealing is a mistake...

In the first example, the hero pushes over the top of a button raise for about 15 BBs, and the button snap calls with K5o; the author praises the button for his play.

Assuming a pot-sized preflop raise and no antes, some quick playing around with pokerstove shows that the author needed to be pushing more than 1/3 of his hands in that spot to make the snap call +EV. However, the snap call is only +EV because of the dead money from the initial preflop raise. In order for raise/call with K5o to be a +EV play, the author in the BB needs to be reraising allin more than 70% of the time. That's a pretty odd and counterintuitive scenario.

When we also factor in the -EV of all the situations where the small blind has a hand he cares to reraise with, this loose bet/call play seems to be a losing strategy from the button player.

Antes and the size of the preflop raise will, of course, affect all this, and I'd welcome some further calculations, but in the absence of them I question holding up button's play as a solid example.

In the second hand, the author shows that pushing 72o preflop as a massive resteal vs. a 3betting opponent who also calls light would be slightly -EV. OK.

However, it's only barely -EV, and by my math pushing 72s in that situation as a resteal *is* profitable. Perhaps "push only the top 85% of cards" or "push any hand you opened with" is a more apt description of +EV play, but "push any two cards" is only slightly inaccurate in this spot.