I hate bad beat stories. Every poker player's got them, and they're usually told (ad infinitum) in a whiney voice.

So I got my just desserts for subjecting you readers to a bad beat story in last week's column. Several aficionados wrote in questioning whether the hand I described was a true "bad beat." I've spent many hours since trying to determine exactly what a bad beat is and still haven't found the answer.

This definition is provided by PokerStars: "To have a hand that is a large underdog beat a heavily favored hand. It is generally used to imply that the winner of the pot had no business being in the pot at all, and it was the wildest of luck that he managed to catch the one card in the deck that would win the pot. We won't give any examples; you will hear plenty of them during your poker career."

My friend Rosemaire says, "A lot of people define a bad beat as someone beat me and I feel bad. It is bad because it happened to me."

Trusty online encyclopedia Wikipedia confirms the difficulty of pinning down the term: "Bad beat is a subjective term for a hand in which a player who had what appeared to be strong cards nevertheless loses. There is no consensus among poker players as to what exactly constitutes a bad beat, and often players will disagree about whether a particular hand was a bad beat."

Now I know that the subject is debated everywhere, not just in my house. That said, nobody would disagree that what happened last Wednesday was a legitimate bad beat.

I had As-10s, and another player had Kd-7s. Pre-flop, my hand beats his 67 percent of the time. The flop was Ks-Jh-Qd, giving me the top straight, which is now a 96 percent expected winner. I bet like crazy and he calls all the way. He catches a king on the turn and a 7 on the river. His full house gets the pot, and I get the bad beat.

Oops, there I go again. Was I whining?