you don't know what the imbalance of your opponents is so you need to play the 0ev hands in order to guard against their imbalance one way or another. blind vs blind hands) it's possible to calculate game-theory optimal (GTO) shove and calls ranges which are profitable in the long run, based on your stack size, and cards / those of your opponents. you're playing a bot in which case find a better game 2. One concept which is highly applicable to poker tournaments and SNGs is ' Nash Equilibrium '. But when you talk about a theoretically '0ev' hand the implication is that 1. Of course if you know what the imbalance of your opponents is then making the adjustments is pretty easy. Thus you are basically exploiting yourself. But you're not playing them because they are '0ev'. In this scenario your '0ev' hands would make up for the lost ev because they benefit from folds. To give a simple example, what happens when you play against a bunch of nits? Well they fold too much so your AA and KK aren't getting the action they want. Supposing your goal is to maintain a overall range ev, the way that ev is distributed among all your hands does not have to necessarily match the way it is distributed in a solver. Looking at individual hand ev does not tell you what will happen in the actual game.
In this case you have to be really careful that you understand what that implies. I assume when you talk about 'hand ev' you mean the theoretical solver ev of the hand.
