how willing are you to take AK to the felt preflop? (nc)

[teamdonkey]

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how willing are you to take AK to the felt preflop?

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at times, very willing. some conditions obviously apply:

- effective stacks should be small. shoving 20BB in is much different than 200BB
- opponents should be at least somewhat loose. Loose as in their initial bet doesn't automatically mean a premium hand, and loose as in they'll sometimes call me with dominated holdings.
- dead money is good. I expect to be shown mid pocket pairs quite a bit, so if i'm putting 25BB in the pot i want to get at least 60 back when i win.
- fold equity is good. Put another way, i'm more willing to make an all in bet with AK than i am to call one.
- maniacs are fun. some people are so wildly aggressive (read: drunk) that i don't mind calling a relatively large preflop all in bet with AK. they're more apt to do this small pairs so i'd really rather have 1010/JJ here, but AK comes out ahead in the end also.

[BlackRain]

Some strange replies to this thread lol. Assuming the other player is full stacked 95% of the time I am unwilling to shove it in preflop. Against shortstacks often I may be pot committed enough to make it worthwhile to just shove or call the all in. And very often AK will showdown the best hand against short stacks looking to gamble and not properly rolled for the game.