Paul, I don't know where the poster got his information. But landrush/round-robin
is a use it or lose it deal. I.e., if a name is already taken, that basically
forfeits the registrar's turn:"Afilias will process domain name requests using
a round-robin mechanism such that no more than one registration request per round-robin
will be processed for any registrar, whether such registration request is accepted
or not" http://www.afilias.info/faq/name-selection.html
However, as I understand
it, a registar's queue basically gets "built" at Afilias, and this involves a domaincheck
program. That program eliminates from the queue any names previously registered
during Sunrise.
As the end result, queues should contain only those names not previously
registered, regardless of what the registrar does.