Or is it as simple as buy order at X and sell order at x*>1, rinse and repeat?
This.

Do you even care if you miss a pump?
Kind of, yeah. Depends how big a pump, there are opportunities to get some cash out of a coin that is really just a scam to make developers and early investors rich. I've got around $300 in this coin right now, a pump might take that to $500 and I can cash out $300.

Isn't your game just locking in a volume of small gains due to fluctuations so that you don't need to predict a pump?
The game is increasing my stack. I mean, ideally I'd like the coin to remain precisely this stagnant forever, because it's at that sweet spot where there's just enough volume to have several trades a minute, but not too much volume to squeeze the prices margins. But it's not going to stay like this forever, so I'd like to see a pump so I can take out some cash to invest elsewhere. It's preferable to a crash that results in volume drying up to the point there's only a couple of trades every five minutes or whatever. That's the worst case scenario, assuming I'm holding coins.