Limit Poker, or Why Don't They Respect My Raises?

I played a couple dozen hands of limit $1/2 online today and lost a sizeable chunk of change. Some of it was donkey play on my part, but the worst two hits I took were:

I was dealt AA in mid position. Two limpers ahead of me. I raise. It folds to the small blind, who calls. The BB is priced in and calls. The first two limpers, now also priced in, call. Crap. Now I'm up against 5 players with my AA. Flop comes rags. Checked to the guy upstream of me, who bets. I raise. Everyone folds except the yahoo, who calls. Turn is a rag. Check, bet, call. River is a King. He checks, I bet (mistake?), he raises, I call. I honestly have no idea what he has, but I figure I'm beat regardless. He shows K3 for two pair and I lose. King Trey, and he's chasing despite my raises.

Other hand i got walloped with was my 99 losing to 66 when the opp sucked out on the river. Sad part is that I KNEW he had a smaller pair than me, but I couldn't get him to go away.

This seems to be a fundamental problem with limit poker (at least the way I play it). If you get a big hand like AA, it's nearly impossible to raise sufficiently to winnow the field down. The donkeys call and, invariably, suck out. This is probably due to the nature of low limit games; i.e., there are a lot more fishy players and calling stations that won't take the hint of a raise. If this had been a NL game, I simply could have raised big enough to get both of these guys to shut down before the river. Maybe.

The guru always says not to complain about bad beats like this. He says, "you're complaining about going up against bad players who make bad calls?!? What? You want to play against better players instead?"

He probably has a point....

That's the bad news. The good news is I followed up my limit debacle by jumping into a couple of 1-table NL Sit and Go's with Bret. I took first in both of them, which recouped 2/3's of my limit losses.

Oh, and the guru called this a.m. He said I didn't do anything wrong last night playing KQ the way I did at the casino tourney. He said he would have pushed all-in, too, and not to dwell on it . Hmmmm. I'm still not convinced I did the right thing, but it's good to hear that a professional poker player would have done the same thing that I did in that situation.

All-in for now...
-Bug