Yeah that one is really cool! They had an initial competition stage, open to everyone, where evaluation was done in a simulation environment (in software) as opposed to real robots. Competitors were given data from dozens of hours of actual robot interaction which they could use to train their policies.

The teams that qualified there made it through to the real robot stage. At that point they could submit their policies for weekly evaluation on actual robots - so they could have a few practice runs on the actual robots before the final leaderboard run.