Travelling and Yu-Gi-Oh!: Life Outside the Brief

Most of this site is about my SEO work. This page is about the two things that kept me balanced through all of it: a card game I never grew out of, and mountains I will happily get up early for.

I have played Yu-Gi-Oh! for nearly ten years, through school, through university, and alongside every job I have held since. And whenever work allows, I travel: not for checklists or landmarks, but to spend time out in nature. Trips to places like Hòa Bình and Ba Vì are my reset button.

The card game I never put down

Ten years is a long time to keep shuffling. I kept playing through university, and kept playing once full-time work began. Decks changed, formats changed, the people across the table changed, but the habit stayed.

Every year, I enter the national Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament in Vietnam. I go for the same reason most regulars go: there is nothing like a full hall of players who all learnt to play the same complicated game.

Leading the NEU Duelists Alliance

At university, I found out I was far from the only duellist on campus. The NEU Duelists Alliance is a group for Yu-Gi-Oh! players at the National Economics University, the same university where I studied Digital Marketing (more on that in my academic story).

I was the group’s Gen 1 lead, its first-generation leader. That meant setting the tone for everything that came after: bringing campus players together and keeping the group active. Starting something from zero, with no template and no senior members to copy, taught me more about organising people than any of my coursework did.

From the table to the microphone

Playing for years gave me something I did not expect to use professionally: genuine card-game knowledge. When I started voicing long-form Vietnamese YouTube videos about Yu-Gi-Oh!, including a sixteen-minute rundown of every World Championship winner, I already knew the cards, the eras, and why each champion’s deck mattered. I did not have to research the subject from scratch; I had lived it.

That voice work is a job in its own right, so the full story lives in Before SEO: Games, Voice and Legal Translation. But it started here, at the table, proof that a hobby can quietly become a skill.

Mountains, not itineraries

My other constant is travel, and I keep it simple. I like going where the air smells green: forested slopes, limestone peaks, viewpoints you have to climb for. Hòa Bình and Ba Vì are two of the trips I return to in my head when work gets noisy.

No itinerary, no activity list, no kilometre count. Just getting out, blending into nature for a while, and coming back clearer-headed. If SEO taught me to measure everything, travel is where I deliberately do not.

Got a favourite deck or a mountain worth the early start? Send it my way. Recommendations for the next game or getaway are always welcome.