Away Game is a periodic on-the-road feature, bringing you behind-the-scenes coverage of some of the world's biggest sporting events.

　　In Las Vegas, luck is like an free throw shot in the NBA: sometimes you've got it, and sometimes you don't. During the first day of the 2007 NBA All-Star Weekend, I saw a few people get lucky. Not in that way, you sick freaks. I'm talking about the second-best kind of lucky: going home with huge amounts of cash.

　　Take Marcus Smith, for example, the winner of EA Sports' NBA Live Challenge. Marcus, better known by his handle NBA Live Boss, battled his way through a grueling tournament to end up in Vegas this weekend, where he had to take on the best of the best in EA's NBA game. For Thursday's finals, his plan was simple: win three games in a row and he'd go home with $50,000. And that's just what he did, in commanding fashion.

　　Here, in a nutshell, was Boss' approach to winning the game: take Tracy McGrady inside and dunk the ball. Seriously, that was it. Of the more than 100 points Boss' Houston Rockets scored against his opponent's Cleveland Cavaliers, 100 percent of those were by T-Mac and the vast majority came from juking with McGrady until he got in the paint, and then dunking the ball. It looked like Kevin Garnett playing against a group of narcoleptic fifth graders.

　　At one point, Boss' opponent pulled within five points by triple-teaming McGrady and getting some lucky turnovers. But it didn't last for long. By the middle of the fourth quarter, the Rockets were up by 30, officials enacted the mercy rule, and that was all she wrote.

　　I don't think Boss' "all T-Mac all the time" strategy was a ringing endorsement for NBA Live's gameplay--I'll say again: 100+ points, all by McGrady, and all in the paint--but you can't argue with his strategy of finding something that works and leaning on it all day long. And now the guy is loose in Sin City with fifty large burning a hole in his pocket. That's the kind of luck I think we can all get behind.