In the first episode of Beyond the Leaderboard, three Orbit Wars competitors weigh scale against clever engineering: • Isaiah Pressman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaiah-pressman-b4b431221/) previously finished 2nd in a competition on his home PC, behind a team running 8 H100s. This time, he won on a cluster, betting that reinforcement learning almost always improves with more compute. • Simon Jégou (https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-jegou/) competed with about an eighth of the winner's compute. He tried three approaches before landing on his 2nd-place solution. • Gerardo Nahuel Del Toro (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardo-del-toro/) reached the top 2% on a single GPU and says massive hardware brings its own problems. Kaggle's Addison Howard hosts the full episode here: https://youtu.be/udrXyYygddo #kaggle