muck AK because A's are dead? no way

[Roswell]

A guy told me a story at the Commerce this weekend, and I'm wondering if there's any merit in this.

He was at the final table (9 players left) of a tournament with $155K. Blinds $4K/$8K. There were two limpers for $8K, and he put in a big raise of $55K with AK on the button. The big blind then went all in for $200K. The first limper agonized, then folded. The second limper folded as well.

The guy with AK thought he had a good read on the first limper as having an ace - something like AT or A9. Thus, at least one of the aces was gone. He was also pretty sure that the big blind had a pair of tens or higher. Based on this info, he mucked the AK faceup. The big blind showed KK, and both the limpers said they had medium aces.

My question to all you tournament experts is: when you are considering taking a coin flip, do you consider whether your cards might be dead, and thus you even less than 48% to win the coinflip? Can you ever get a reliable read of this?

By the way, I asked him "How do you know the limpers didn't have 77," and he said "they would have raised coming in with that."