It's been a brutal day here in Las Vegas. I just got back from a Texas Hold 'Em 3-6 limit game at the MGM's poker room. After a run of bad cards and poor check-raises I went on a run to get back up to even before dumping nearly all of both stacks back. I don't think I've ever seen so many hands of Q-2, A-3 and non-suited disconnectors in my life. And even when things looked promising, I caught some bad beats on fourth street and the river. The worst was a Queen-high flush (with a straight daw on the board) that I played strong, only to lose to a guy with a King-high flush. That's the biggest difficulty with limit games -- you can't control the game nearly as much as you can in a no-limit game or tournament. Had it been a no-limit game, he admitted, I could've pushed him off the hand and won the pot.

On more than a few occasions I drew pocket pairs, or K-A or A-Q, etc., but again could rarely do anything with them because a) the flop drew flush and straight draws for my opponents; b) the table was fairly agressive in calling any pre-flop raises (especially since it's such a low limit).

I then fell victim to a slow-played ace. In hindsight, the guy played it well but an oddly-timed bet after a couple of checks had me and the other player still in the hand thinking we could get him with what turned about to be flush draws for both of us, only Mr. Slow Play got us both. Had he made bets along the way, however, at least on the turn, he probably would've drawn us in and taken even more of our money.

As for March Madness, things aren't going very well on that front either. I flushed another $20 away on a pair of parlays that both lost -- thanks to Drake's dramatic overtime loss to Western Kentucky, and San Diego's overtime shocker against UConn. Nearly all of ESPNZone in New York-New York was chanting for overtime in the Drake game, and somehow Drake erased a nine-point deficit with 2 minutes to play to get there (they were favored by four). But, even up four at one point in OT, they couldn't hold off Western Kentucky as Ty Rogers hit a game-winning three-pointer as time expired. Western won by two and I was glad Drake was going home since they cost me my parlay by not covering the spread. Not surprisingly, the same thing was uttered a little while later by a few people that had money on UConn as De'Jon Jackson hit the game-winner with 1.2 seconds left.

This, by the way, is why parlays of course pay so well (6-to-1 on a three-team parlay). And in this age of parity it's become that much harder to hit on those. Butler and Texas, both of whom won by 20, were better bets, but didn't pay out as well.

As for my brackets, the USC and UConn losses put a dent in one of them (I had USC in the Elite Eight and UConn in the Sweet Sixteen), but the other one is in good shape with only UConn as a big loss (from the Sweet Sixteen).

That's about all the bad beats I can handle for one day, but feel free to share your worst bad-beat stories here.

-- Brian Wacker, Sun-Sentinel.com