[beetman]

Without knowing much about the game, I'd assume Badger must be wrong since he's disagreeing with Zee.

Why would you assume Badger is automatically wrong? S & M & Z aren't all-knowing, and their books sometimes contain typos or statements that could easily be misinterpreted.

My biggest complaint about the "Advanced Players" series is that they're not edited as well as they could be, and it can be difficult to tell what kind of game they're talking about.
Ray can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe his comments about preflop raising are mainly meant for higher stakes games where most people know what they're doing. Badger's comments are meant for games that aren't as tight, where people are often playing mostly random hands. (Even when they aren't quite playing random hands, some of their non-random hands are almost as bad as random hands. 5678 is a very popular fish's hand and is actually worse than a random hand.)

Say two decent players limp in ahead of you and you have A24T with a suited ace. If one has A367 w/ a suit and the other has A4JJo, the three of you are in roughly the same shape before the flop. The same is true if the third guy has something like KQT9o or KQQTo.

If those two players were likely playing random hands, you're in better shape. A24Ts has 44% of the preflop equity against two random hands, and scoops about 50% more often than the random hands. Also, if there are other idiots in the game, they may call the raise with garbage--the value of A24Ts is even higher against even more random hands.

In a game where 5 or 6 people routinely see the flop, you're leaving money on the table if you don't raise preflop with a fair number of hands.