Isn't that what the 'watching' thing is for though? I guess you probably get more alerts but in the case I'm looking at (and not unusually) people are doing multiple small bids with 6 days to go!
No that's shit. I do it once to get it there then quite often forget I did it but it works most of the time. I don't get alerts for anything as they're just like white noise.
I've always done that. It puts the item there at the top of my page when I open it up and then I can manually snipe in with a few seconds to go.