The very first season was solid and made sense.
I am trying very hard not to laugh out loud right now. :p
As someone who played the card game, the show was always infuriating. Ignored rules, made-up rules, cards that have made-up effects, effects that make no sense in the context of the card game as portrayed in the show and only make sense in the holographic representation of the game that basically didn't exist until Kaiba made it...(sighs). I mean the plot was fine for a kid's show, I guess, but man, they sure took liberties with the games themselves.
If you're interested in a darker side of Yu-Gi-Oh, consider watching what's now called Season 0. In this version, Yami Yugi, rather than just playing YGO, is a more general "game master", playing lots of different things, using a combination of game theory, psychology, and logic to best his opponents. That was the original concept, but when Kazuki Takahashi introduced an early version of the YGO card game in one particular storyline, fans were very interested in the idea, and so he developed the card game further into what we know as Yu-Gi-Oh today.
Season 0 is actually pretty good; I've read the 8(?) volumes of the manga before, and it's a bit darker than the 4Kids version of YGO we had in the west. Not that that's automatically better, but the stakes are a bit higher and life is a bit more ruthless. I thought it was pretty good.
If you were a fan of Yu-Gi-Oh, you should give the entire series a watch. Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series by LittleKuriboh. It's actually excellent.
Find an opportunity to watch the movie, then watch his abridged movie, too.