[adanthar]

It's surprising your buddy doesn't get this, because the best examples of a read turning a play +EV are all at the 109's/215's.

Example (which has kinda been covered already): You are up against a perfect pushbotter during 150/300 etc; he pushes on the button with 5 BB. You have two cards in the BB, and you know he is pushing any two, so the two cards you call with are substantially lower in rank than they would be if you thought he was too tight on the bubble. There's no way your friend is *not* doing some version of this - he doesn't always call A8o and fold A7o no matter who is doing the pushing, does he?

I think what your friend is really getting at is that there's no such thing as a -EV play that, when successful, nonetheless increases future EV (such as by giving you a big stack with which to bully.) This is also wrong, and your friend no doubt knows it even if he doesn't understand it, because if he's a winning player, at some point during his play he has pushed over a button minraise with trash on the bubble solely because he had the button covered. That is a -EV play given his crappy hand, but it's nevertheless +EV because when he wins (often) he can bully and take first.

So, I think your friend needs to reexamine what it is that guys like Gigabet do a bit. However, he is nonetheless mostly right in that 95% of guys that try Gigaplays or ZJ-plays do it at the wrong time or just plain suck. It's quite possible he's never seen a really blatant example of it pulled off correctly. I have. It's lovely.