A Bunch Of Links

My relationship with YOMI

Your Only Move Is Hustle, or YOMI for short, is a weird little indie turn-based simultaneous strategy game, disguised as a crosshybrid of Melee, Guilty Gear and a bunch of other fighting games, which you can get for 5 bucks (in euros). That is to say, it’s the type of game that most definitely gets a cult following, and I am a proud member of that cult.

My journey with YOMI began (at the time of writing, 06/11/2026) close to 3 years ago at this point.

It was September of 2023. The game had just gone on sale for even cheaper than its already paltry price1 and I got it on a whim together with a friend after watching Winning the BIGGEST Tournament in Yomi Hustle to PROVE A POINT, the video which kickstarted the most competitive YOMI player’s careers out of any singular event in human kind2.

Of course, getting good was not on my mind in the slightest at the beginning. The first tournament3 I ever played was on the 30th of December, 2023. Now a quirk of this game is that unlike most other online “fighting games”, ping doesn’t play a part in gameplay at all4, so tournaments aren’t locked to particular regions. This has the interesting effect of what could only be described as timezone hell - no time slot can possibly be comfortable for everyone in the whole wide world, so tournament organisers have to compromise by pushing their broken attempts at solutions to a logistics puzzle that was impossible from the onset.

As a result, my first tournament, PTCL 29, of the now defunct weekly PROTOCOL series, started at 1am. Note that this is a frequently occuring pattern. I’m proud to say I won a whole game, which is however balanced out by the fact that a certain player by the name of XGalaxy, who is mostly irrelevant to this story outside of the following, parried my burst at 3am to knock me out of losers bracket5. I couldn’t even properly let out my rage, lest I wake up my sleeping family members.

Needless to say, I got hooked.

So hooked in fact, that in the following summer of 2024, through a combination of playing upwards of 8 hours a day6 and the power of sheer coincidence 7, I managed to win the PROTOCOL Invitational tournament (which would end up being PROTOCOL’s last hoorah) and won 500 dollars in the process8. It was 2am (I told you, this happens a lot) and I was happy out of this world. I was a relatively unknown player at the time, for one due to spending my first half an year only lurking on Discord, and for another, when I did eventually start talking to people, doing it outside of the main competitive circles. From the outsider’s perspective it was a zero to hero story and at the time, I most definitely bought into my own hype.

Life however, goes on. It’s been more time since that tournament win, which would end up being my defining feat within the YOMI sphere, than it was then, measured from when I started playing.

I struggled a lot afterwards. PROTOCOL was effectively in a comatose state for the next couple of months, and while there were small weekly series like Bargun’s bin9, there was nothing to quite fill in PROTOCOL’s gap, until Starlight came along with the inORBIT tournament series. Everyone was itching for some action and inORBIT 1 came in as the first big tournament since the PTCL Invitational qualifiers, with a certain player, who was and still is considered the greatest of all time, Elucard 10, coming out of retirement to play.

I had (very foolishly may I add) tied my self worth to my skill in YOMI Hustle at the time, and a lack of tournaments had mostly deprived me of a place to prove myself, that my previous results weren’t just flukes, that I could keep and keep winning. So I played.

And I got 2nd. You will notice, this is another pattern.

In my history of playing inORBIT, I’ve gotten 2nd place on 9 seperate occassions, which is seemingly an occurance thouroughly seeped in my bulgarian heritage. Another bulgarian player who was active before my time, octo doggo, also had a propensity for getting 2nd, at 7 by my count (5 of which are, famously, to the aforementioned Elucard). Now 2nd place is by no means a bad result, in fact I now consider it something to be proud of. But at the time, it was soulrendering to me.

  1. Interesting story about that actually, the game was initially going to be released for free, but the community of beta players collectively pestered the developer, ivy sly, to at least give it some price tag, which is where we arrived at its current price.↩︎

  2. Maybe only second to “Fresh Milk” - The Coolest Bug In Fighting Game History, but I’m obviously more nostalgic for the one already mentioned. Excuse my bias.↩︎

  3. A link to my Start.gg account for the curious.↩︎

  4. To a reasonable extent of course. You do actually need a working internet connection cough cough DiegoLOL.↩︎

  5. YOMI operates under the double elimination tournament format, which is relatively standardized throughout the fighting game scene. It’s a regular tournament bracket, except that every player gets 2 “lives” - if you lose once, it’s not quite over yet, you can still play in the losers bracket, until you are knocked out again.↩︎

  6. An act which should neither be lauded as a feat, nor would I encourage anybody to perform, and for that matter, one which I would never attempt again. A (not so happy) coincidence of being 17, jobless, and having 3 months of summer vacation to spend on whatever my heart desired. I do not regret this period of my life, however if isn’t clear, being critical towards that type of behaviour is very important.↩︎

  7. hunter, who handily beat my ass in winner’s finals of top 8 and got to grands on winner’s side, went to sleep (same timezone as me. I told you) and disqualified out of bracket, thus making my loser’s finals vs OreoCraz a best of 3 (unlike the usual best of 1 ruleset) and the de-facto grand finals. I beat Oreo 2 games to 1 to take the tournament.↩︎

  8. I still remember my dad’s snarky remark at the time after telling him about it (roughly paraphrased and translated from Bulgarian): “This is worth 1 month of salary you could’ve gotten for working a summer job. Reflect.”↩︎

  9. Courtesy of my great friend Bargun. Fun story about Bargun’s bin - the only reason it exists is because Bargun lost a bet to me. I was playing against bucghat, a player who I really struggled with at the time (and still honestly kind of do), and we made a bet - if I won, he’d start running a tournament for the fuck of it. He left his laptop thinking there’s no way in hell I would win, but lo and behold, 30 minutes later he came back to a winscreen.↩︎

  10. Although he would tell you otherwise. If you’re somehow reading this, I know how you feel.↩︎