Limp into the money...smart, or shameful?

ESPN's WSOP covered this on their telecasts earlier this year, but it's a good debate topic. When you're severely short-stacked and the money bubble is close, what is your view on folding to get your min-cash?

Normally, you have to play to win the tournament, but here was the situation I faced last Saturday night in one of the Stars $2 1 rebuy/1 add-on tourney (fwiw, a great structure to play in): 14 players to go after the break, I have button position and just under 1 BB in my stack (lost 90% of stack 2 hands before).

Short of seeing something like J-J through A-A, I decided that playing a hand here and doubling/tripling up would not help me too much in the tourney, so I opted to try to limp into the money ($9 for 342nd place...$6 in buy-ins/add-ons invested). Kind of a chickenshit strategy, honestly, but the way I see it, a min-cash is much more preferable to a no-cash...even giving up potential equity in a deeper run by playing it out sooner.

As it turned out, the best of both worlds happened for me: I survived the money bubble (was 342nd out of 342nd when we hit the money, heh) with 1,700 chips, and quickly sextupled up after J-8 flopped a straight. Tripled up 2 hands later with A-A, and 15 minutes after the money bubble broke, I was at nearly 200K in chips....eventual finishing 14th out of almost 2800 players for a $69 payday - I'll take it, but oh, if not for being on the short end of a set over set situation, could have been even greater!