HE’S the little-known card-sharp who quit a career in law and is now earning as much at the poker table as some of Scotland’s best known names in sport.
Niall Farrell’s winnings in just five years as a pro poker player is comparable to the earnings of former world snooker champion Stephen Hendry and current PDC world darts champion Gary Anderson.
The 28-year-old Glaswegian, who curbed a law career because it was "boring" has typically in the last five years earned £3 million in online and live poker tournaments - and says that this is his career.
Gary Anderson has earnings of £2.32 million in his 15-year career while Stephen Hendry averaged winnings of £2 million every five years in his 26-year career.
Farrell, who is now one of poker's leading European players and goes by the online moniker of Firaldo, is in Monte Carlo for the biggest and richest European Poker Tour festival of them all - the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo Casino EPT Grand Final including the prestigious Main Event.
The star-studded event is taking place in Monaco, one of Europe’s most glamorous and exciting destinations. Farrell, originally from Dumfries, who is second on Scotland’s all-time poker money list behind David Vamplew won his biggest live event in October winning the prestigious European Poker Tour Malta Main Event, snagging £420,000 for his efforts.
It makes him only the second Scot to have won an European Poker Tour Main Event; with Vamplew, who hails from Edinburgh, taking down the EPT London Main Event eight years ago.
Despite that he is only known within the bubble of tournament poker, a game where the majority of elite players prefer to fly under the radar.
And the Scot, whose mum Marna lives near Cumnock, and his father Donald lives in Cyprus, has no plans to continue a career in the legal profession, with an ambition to make enough from poker to retire.
"Before I went to university, I used to watch late night poker, played a wee bit with my friends, and then started taking it seriously in the last year of uni. By the time I graduated i was making decent money so I thought I would give it a wee go and if it went belly up I had my law degree to fall back on.
"But, no, law is really tedious. Law, it just really bored me to be honest.
"I won't do poker forever. My plan is to make enough to retire but Plan B was to make enough money to go do something else, I just don't know what that is yet.
"Definitely not law, god!"
His preparation for Monte Carlo has been eventful.
He was challenged to a £10,000 'battle' at the beginning of April by a PokerStars Caribbean Adventure player Scotsman Martin McCormick at the The Alea casino in Glasgow, while he was playing for much lower stakes - a 30 dollar tournament - with friends. But it did not happen, as he got thrown out after drinking too much.
"I got really drunk and got thrown out the casino that night. It's weird, friends said it was a dramatic miscarriage of justice, but I don't remember, so I'll have to take their word for it," he said.
"I was just playing a little game with friends, nothing really serious, and he came over and offered to play one on one for £10,000. And I accepted. But it didn't happen because we just ended up betting p*shed together."
He says that he will try to control what he drink when it comes to the Main Event, though.
"In serious games I don't drink," he said from Monaco. "The higher stuff, where there is a lot of money involved, you have to be semi-professional about that. I won't drink during the Main Event. It is too big. And my mate has just said I will. I might have beer at the end of the night. If it's a low buy-in (to enter), like £2000 or below I will have a few beers."
His hectic lifestyle - he jets all over the world for tournaments and can be playing for much of the awake day - means that having a girlfriend is difficult.
"I am single. I recently broke up with my girlfriend, I was living in Canada and we broke up in October. It was in good terms," he said.
"What I do can be quite a stress on relationships. I was actually engaged to a girl before and it caused a lot of hassles. You find that a lot of the guys tend to find girlfriends within the poker world, like they may be part of the staff or the players themselves, because they understand that it can be a bit tough."
Nevertheless, he does not seem himself as the most active poker player in the circuit; in fact he describes himself as "quite lazy".
"In the short-term there is luck involved with poker, obviously. In a single tournament, anything can happen. But like in any sport, over the long term the better players will win. Obviously that's why you play a lot of tournaments, especially online. You play, like, 10,000 tournaments in a year or something, so it averages out," he explained.
"I am quite lazy. I actually online will play 15,000 in my career and then I have played about 1,000 or something live. But that's more a lack of work ethic than anything else."
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