it is the last minutes , maybe tens of minutes when people wager to place
unless it is some unknown website with no audience , if gamblers see positive EV chances , they would wager most definitely
but with the daily , or 48 h contests it is sometimes hard to find enough players to play high stakes , so there definitely is a chance to score top 10 even for the faucet players
next time there will be more competition and I saw wolf contests where to place top 10 one had to wager at least 0.4+ btc