You can not reg a name in the purge period by hand cokee except it is really a crappy name. There are commercial players like Dotster,
www.namewinner.com (auction type grabbing service with a minimum bid of $8.75), Snapnames, $49 to $69 fix price grabbing service,
www.snapnames.com. And other quasi-commercial grabbers I have never tried. And the last option is to register for a direct connection or API from a ICANN accredited registrar and use your own PERL/CGI scripts. As for the grabbing performance, Dotster was grabbing quite cool names like 3 letter .coms recently but now it is slumpy. Just have one snap bullet and never worked for me. Besides your snap actually for 8 or 6 months since you need to put a snap 2 months before a name get expired and take the 2 months standard deletion process. I have never heard someone grabbed a 3 letter .com from snap (anyone grabed here?).
After all, stick around and read valuable threads in DNforum. It is a good place to learn.
Sir