Once you climb up higher, people are not going to call shoves on the first hand with crap, at least not regularly. With AK you don't really aim to reduce variance, you generally want as much as possible in pf. So if the stakes you are playing and the playerpool allows it, I would always flip with AK pf vs some crap than minraise it to the flop and start the guessing game. That's not even a close one.