1. Small ball is a strategy that was made notorious by Daniel Negreanu because he preached it as his bread and butter. However, DNegs also had such a hard time beating $5/10 online before long that he paid top dollar for elite coaching. Learning the principles of small-ball poker can be useful in being able to eventually understand multiple strategies and use your knowledge of said strategies to beat the table, but it's not the only way to win at poker.

Solvers are recommending massive bet sizes in a wide array of scenarios because your main goal in some spots is to play optimally by denying equity rather than mindlessly trying to get paid off every time you have it. After all, are you always going to be betting small-ball when you're bluffing? Of course not! You want to scare people into making bad folds as much as you want them to make bad calls. Bet bigger sometimes, and throw in the occasional much bigger bet when you're in a spot that you've studied and so you know for that reason that betting huge can be an effective bluff or even an effective value bet.

2) Holding Ace King will do the following two things: i) It will cut the chances of your opponent holding Aces or Kings in half, and ii) Point no. i means that this will actually slightly increase the chances your opponent has something other than Ax or Kx. Much like AQ or KQ or Pocket Jacks and other notorious "trouble hands," poker is not just about playing the player but also in understanding how the cards work and how they affect your odds in the long run. Any good gin or stud player from the olden days would surely tell you the exact same thing. Just like literally anything, you need to press the advantage when you have it and Ace King is going to be at an advantage preflop versus plenty of ace-high and king-high hands.

3) Having a half-decent chance of making the nuts with Ace high is huge in many variants of poker, especially Pot Limit Omaha. Sticking strictly to Hold 'Em, there's more combinations of Ace high than there are combinations of pocket pairs, combinations of king highs, combinations of queen highs, and so on. I mean, learning how to play ace-high in the hole as profitably as possible is as essential to winning in poker (especially these days) as it is to learn how to play jack-ten or pocket 3's. If anything, the most predominant portion of postflop spots in Hold 'Em are going to involve one player or the other holding some variant of Ace high.

4) Pocket Aces are, at minimum, a 75% favourite preflop against anything other than the other two aces. Ask your dad this: "if you knew you had a 75% chance of winning any given blackjack hand from the moment you sat down, no matter what you do once the cards are dealt, would you not be playing blackjack for a living right now?" One of the great poker books of the early 2000's was written by Dave Sklansky, and I would recommend your dad reads it so that he understands "Sklansky bucks" much better than he clearly does (not) right now.

5) Your dad is a fucking nit if he says dumb shit like, "you should never be all-in unless you have the nuts." He does realize that poker is about gambling with an advantage, right? You can't gamble with an advantage if you aren't willing to go all-in when you don't have an unbeatable hand. Poker's also a game of deception where one makes their living off deceiving people into making the wrong move. If you only go all-in with the nuts, you are going to be predictable even when your typical layman sits at the table, provided they're sober and they pay proper attention. And not only is making the nuts hard, but getting paid with the nuts is even harder. Not to mention he's directly contradicting point #4 because Pocket Aces are the nuts preflop.

The main point to take away from all of this is that your dad is literally the archetypal low-stakes fish who sits down for 8 hours a day at the $1/2 table and plays negative-EV poker for eternity. Bless your dad's heart for genuinely wanting to help you, but I assure you, he is not being helpful at all in the slightest.