Steps not for me?

I tried the Party Steps once again, without much luck. In my last Step 2 game, I raised preflop with 99 and got reraised by an early limper - but he did not go all-in, otherwise I would have felt sure he had AA. After much agonizing I decided to call, only to have him flip up A8 (???), and get an 8 on the flop and another one on the river. What can you do?

I had managed to survive long enough to at least get a Step 1 ticket again, so I entered it immediately. Things did not go so well and I still had 1900 when the level was already 50/100. As BB, I got KQs. There was a limp and a raise in front of me (to 300) and I decided to call, as did the limper. The flop was K63, the pot was now already 950 and I had 1610 left in my stack. I decided to go all-in... and got called by the raiser, who held the fantastic hand A2, with the Ace of clubs. Clearly somebody who never heard about pot odds.

Now you're probably thinking he made his flush. No no, the poker gods had thought of something much funnier. First there was a 4 on the turn and then there was a 5 on the river...

What do you think about my play here?

This put me down to 518, and though I doubled up on the next hand with K9 which got called by Q5s (but they were sooooooted!), I never really recovered from this. I hovered around 1200 chips until I lost a race with AJ against 33 - it was the same guy from before - I would like to actually criticize his decision, but due to a limper behind him the pot at this moment was already 1800 and he only had to call 900, so he was in this case getting quite good odds, or at least reasonable ones.

Fortunately, when I got booted from the Step 2 game I had also registered for a $10 SNG at Pacific, and made it to 2nd place there - I might have made first had it not been for yet another runner-runner-straight when I was ahead.

I had a look at my profits for the month, grouped by site, and discovered that I made a profit of $100 (!) at Pacific. If only I had played there exclusively, the month might have looked a bit better overall - my overall profit for the month is a grand $7.87 at the moment. This is my worst result since I bought the Harrington books. Still, the month is not quite over yet!