For every dream come true in Las Vegas, there are a thousand tales of despair, as gamblers learn the harsh realities of betting against the house.

Johnny Benson found that out the hard way Saturday night, as it took just one failed Goodyear radial on Lap 65 of the Qwik Liner Las Vegas 350 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway to send him from what looked like a certain victory to a 27th-place finish. In the process, that eliminated all but a single point of his lead over Ron Hornaday Jr. with six races left to go on the 2008 season.

Or what about poor Erik Darnell, who put his Northern Tool + Equipment Ford F-150 into the lead on Lap 104 and survived five subsequent caution flags and restarts, only to be passed by Mike Skinner's Toyota Tundra-sponsored No. 5 on the race's penultimate lap? On the final circuit, Darnell got by Skinner and then lost the lead for good, coming up an agonizing 0.02 seconds behind Skinner's Toyota.

Of course, if you're Skinner, who won his first race of the season, or Hornaday, who is now in a virtual dead heat for the 2008 NCTS championship after finishing fifth with his Camping World Chevrolet Silverado, Las Vegas was great.

For race fans, it was a mixed bag — on one hand, there was the thrilling two-lap Skinner-Darnell shootout at the end of the race, a terrific battle to the wire. On the other hand, 18 of the race's final 26 laps were under yellow, as no less than five cautions flew during that period.

All told, it made for something of a schizophrenic evening.

"It's amazing, I tell you," said the veteran Skinner, who ended a 22-race winless streak with his Vegas victory. "I've been beat many, many times when I had the fastest truck. Erik Darnell is going to be sitting up here one day saying the same thing. He had the fastest truck tonight. We were just able to work him hard on the restarts and he was doing everything he was supposed to do to win the race."

For Skinner's Bill Davis Racing teammate Benson, though, the night ended in frustration. "There's no doubt that we had a fast truck - it was flawless," said Benson. "I'm still real surprised that happened because there was zero indication and it drove just incredible. We were out there biding our time and weren't even running as hard as it probably could have. I was backing off early and it would run wide open all the way around here."

But through it all — the good, the bad and the ugly — the bottom line is that there are six NCTS races left on the season, and Benson and Hornaday are just one point apart. As it's looked all along, this fight won't be settled until the final race of the season.

And if you're a fan of Truck racing, that's a very good thing indeed.