It is much more profitable to bring half the maximum or even the minimum to reduce your variance when the bad players inevitably suck out on you.

OMG this is SO wrong. It is MUCH more profitable to have a full stack because when you DO succeed in stacking another player, you'll make more money. The only time playing with less than a full stack can be a good idea is when you are a worse than average player (a lot of beginners are, for obvious reasons), in which case you might expect to lose and therefore want to minimise your losses.

And to bang on a bit more - there is an enormous paradox in that sentence - bad players may suck out on you a lot but BY DEFINITION you will win the majority of these hands against them! A suckout is a by-definition unlikely event - the likely alternative is that you will win, and when you win, you want to win as much as possible.

final note - if the original poster meant that the guy was holding 77 versus his AK on an AA78T board, then he should be aware that he was actually beaten by a full house (7s full of aces)!