beating back ordering services

how to beat name grabbing services like snapnames

[pseudorandom]

Hi, greetings to all fellow members ;)
I know this q has been raised before, but I wish to get
more specific. Suppose we have a domain name with a
decent (good, not overwhelming) demand that's expiring.
What fraction of time does it usually take after its
deletion that competing services and individuals grab it?
i.e. On an average, does the availability come down to
seconds or minutes?
When doing it manually, can I do better than just query
that particular registrar's whois at sufficiently short
intervals around the drop time and go for the quick
kill?

pseudo

[CHC]

There is no way in a million years that you can secure any name worth more than about $25 by interrogating the whois and registering it manually. All the drop catching services use ultra high speed servers sitting on big fat pipes and they are monitoring the whois many, many times a second or putting through thousands of speculative registrations without even waiting for the whois to update.

They will have registered the premium drops before you can even blink.

[ggrot]

Bah. They are also handling thousands of clients simultaneously. You'd be surprised. You can beat them.

[pseudorandom]

Please understand what I said,
a) I speculated on what would be the best techniques for
an individual (not relying on commercial grabbing),
b) If you think anything worth something would always be
grabbed commercially then that's not entirely true.
Read this post by Lisa,
[webmasterworld.com...]

By no means was I trying to suggest the best way to do it!