Folding AK pre-flop

[VBCurtis]

For those of you who say "never", ask yourself what the raiser and 3-bet ranges are. Put yourself in the 3-bettor's position-- what is your raising range against the original raiser? For a fairly tight raiser (say a 2/4 game with a generic 16/6 player), a 3-bet range of TT+, AQs+, AKo might be typical. How does AKo fare against that 3-bet range? We dominate AQs, and are crushed by AA and KK, while most of the range we are coin-tossing with. Even if you pokerstove it and decide it has enough equity, what's your plan postflop?

The way I see it, if I have respect for both raisers ahead of me, AKo doesn't have enough equity to make it a must-play, and I don't see how I'm going to outplay my opps with it (since both a cold-call of 3 and a cap give me pretty narrow ranges too, and we're assuming respectable opps, who might be thinking about our range).

Luckily, it's a really rare case that I respect both raisers, so I almost never fold AKo. But I play live, where two good opponents is rare itself.