Naturally, Niall Farrell’s bank in Dumfries was suspicious at first. This scruffily dressed customer was seeking to wire extraordinary sums of money abroad.
There seemed to be no fixed monthly income – only random arrivals of large amounts of capital, much of which he seemed to want to divert to foreign countries. In the banking world, electronic eyebrows are programmed to rise at such activities.
What was his game? Money laundering, perhaps? Was he a drugs baron?
It turns out his game is poker. And he is pretty good at it. In terms of career earnings, the unprepossessing 36-year-old is the most successful Scot the game has ever seen.
Though far from a household name, he is the Andy Murray of this much-misunderstood mind sport, rubbing shoulders with the greats of the game at tourna-ments around the world and, occasionally, taking them to the cleaners.
Niall Farrell is the most successful Scot the game of poker has ever seen
To date, his winnings stand at more than $11 million (around £8.5 million) – of which he counts $4 million as pure profit. And, when you make your living from what you win in card games, you pay no tax.
One half expects to see a Porsche or a Ferrari sitting in Mr Farrell’s driveway, but there is no vehicle in it at all. It turns out he doesn’t drive.
Nor are there obvious signs of opulence in the modern, detached home in a Dumfries cul-de-sac where he lives with his Lithuanian partner Edita, 42, and their four-year-old son Ruairi.
As for the man himself, he pads around in jeans and a T-shirt in the house his gam-bling winnings allowed him to buy outright a few years ago. The set-up is at once wholly normal and curiously disconcerting.
Where is the glitz and glamour we have come to associate with poker’s high rollers? There is not even an expensive watch on his wrist.
The ‘hackneyed’ image of high stakes poker needs some updating, Mr Farrell says.
‘It’s quite tough to bridge the gap between people in poker and people who don’t know about poker. In popular culture, like movies and stuff, it’s a lot different from reality.’
This is why there has been a largely positive reaction from the poker community to a new BBC Scotland documentary following Mr Farrell’s fortunes for a year as he com-petes in tournaments across the globe.
He wears jeans and T-shirts at the poker tables too. So do many of his fellow players. And there is little glamour in the soulless conference rooms where hundreds – even thousands – of the world’s top players converge to take money off each other.
‘If you are playing in a poker tournament you can be sat at a table for 14 hours, so you don’t want to be there in a starched shirt and suit. I think those ideas come from James Bond movies. If you are sat in a convention centre with 4000 sweaty men all day, you don’t want to be dressed up for a job interview. You just want to be com-fortable.’
In the documentary, The Four Rules of the Poker Kings, we see a dressed-down Mr Farrell carrying €25,000 in a Sainsbury’s bag in the streets of Monte Carlo – his buy-in for a secondary tournament in case he loses all the money he wired across to enter the main one.
We see him gutted at the turn of a card which costs him €200,000, meaning he re-turns home with a mere €40,000 profit.
When this happens, he says, he normally doesn’t want to speak to anyone for an hour or two. Then he is fine again.
Things work out better in Dublin where, for his efforts over a few days, he wins the tournament and walks away with €66,000.
It is a disappointing summer season in Las Vegas, however. ‘It’s deflating, it’s disap-pointing, you know, when you are just getting constantly hammered over and over again,’ he reflects in the documentary after another bad day at the tables. ‘My re-ward for this 12 hours of work? Minus five grand.’
Late last month Mr Farrell returned home after a seven week stay in Vegas playing in the World Series – poker’s signature tournaments. Did things go any better for him this year?
‘I lost smallish,’ he says. ‘I think I lost, like $40,000 which is fairly typical for Vegas.
‘Basically, how it works is one in every six or seven you have a good year which is winning, but you win a [ITALS] lot [CLOSE]. So, you lose small, lose small, lose small … and then I had one year when I won close to $900,000 over the two months, so you have to be there to do it. The last couple I haven’t got on so well, but that is to be expected.’
It was in his student days at Stirling University that Mr Farrell and his friends started playing poker as a cheaper alternative to going out to the pub.
Mr Farrell has competed in poker tournaments across the world
He recalls: ‘I thought “I’m really good at this. I’m going to play online” and I got ab-solutely destroyed. But I’m quite competitive. I don’t really want to get beaten very time I play so I started to learn about it.’
Pretty quickly he graduated from ‘awful’ to merely ‘quite bad’ which was still good enough to win modest amounts on the lower stakes tables.
The best players, he soon learned, minimise their losses when their luck is bad and maximise it when it is good. Back when he was studying law in Stirling the figures told their own story. In his first profitable year, he made $663 dollars – acceptable for a hobbyist, but nothing more.
He says: ‘I’m quite lucky, though, in that once I get into something I get quite ob-sessed with it. It means you get quite good really quickly, but it also means that’s all you do. Now that I’ve been doing it this long, I can see that everyone who ended up in this was the same. It’s all the same characteristics. They’re very obsessive, very competitive so it’s quite weird how your brain shapes where you end up.’
In the second half of his final year at university, he was winning five figure sums online and increasingly less interested in his law degree. He completed it to keep his parents Donald and Marna happy but, after graduation, a difficult conversation with them lay ahead.
‘I said to my mum and dad “I’m going to try to play poker for a bit. I’ve got a law de-gree so if it goes wrong, I can fall back on it”, but I hoped it didn’t because I didn’t really like law.’
It was a difficult adjustment for his parents, who by then were separated. Their son was naturally bright – a straight As pupil at school. Now he had a degree – and yet he was suggesting his future lay in a game he played online.
Yet, in gambling terms, there was a certain logic to his approach. What did he have to lose?
‘At 22, you don’t have the same bills to pay, you don’t have any dependents and if I’m broke at 22 then I’m just the same as every other 22-year-old. It’s not a big deal.’
And, although his only real experience of a regular job was a stint at a Carphone Warehouse, Mr Farrell was fairly sure that taking orders from superiors was not for him.
‘I’m not great with authority – especially when a lot of the work set ups that I see to-day are people who are the boss because they have been there longer rather than because they are better at their job. I don’t think I could handle that too well.
‘Poker, for all its ups and downs, is at its core, a pure meritocracy – the harder you work and the better you get, the more you are rewarded in the long term.
‘It might not happen straight away because of the short-term luck factor but, over the long term, you will be rewarded.’
His argument goes a long way towards explaining why a net loss of $40,000 over seven weeks in Vegas is taken on the chin – and why losing out on €200,000 on the flip of a card puts him on a downer for only an hour or two.
Poker, explains Mr Farrell, isn’t like chess or tennis. Sometimes the rank amateur de-feats the seasoned pro. Sometimes you play an impeccable tournament and still lose your shirt. But, in the long term, the best players will generate healthy profits.
‘Losing is a very big part of the game. It’s actually the majority of the game,’ he says.
In his first year playing professional poker online, Mr Farrell cleared a profit of around £20,000 tax free – roughly what he might have expected to make as a trainee lawyer. In his second year, he made around £60,000.
‘All the years after that it was six figures.’
He bought a house in Ayrshire for his mother and, as the big money started rolling in, bought himself a £10,000 watch. He lost it when he was drunk.
‘I think that was the universe telling me extortionate things aren’t for you,’ he says in the documentary.
Even without extravagances, he has no regrets about his career choice. ‘You get to do something you enjoy, you get to travel with people you like and you are beholden to no one really,’ he says. ‘You look after your family and you don’t have to worry about anything else.’
The birth of his son four years ago and his relationship with Edita – whom he met on the poker tour – has prompted Mr Farrell to be more cautious with his hard-won fi-nances.
He divides his fortune into two – his bank roll and his living expenses. ‘I take what I think I’m going to need for a certain period of time and I add 50 per cent to it and put that in the bank and that’s for living expenses, so at the moment I think I have four and a half years of living expenses.
‘I also have my bank roll which I use to play poker.’ It is this he eats into when he wires money abroad ahead of the tournaments he travels to.
‘When I go to the bank it’s always interesting … but they have updated my account now so when I go in now, they have all these notes popping up on it saying look, I’m not money laundering or anything.
‘It is very unusual. You are sending money to a casino, so it could be for anything.’
Does he worry about his bank roll being wiped out? Is it ‘game over’ if that ever hap-pens?
‘The way I’m set up, it should never happen,’ he says. ‘People a lot smarter than me with mathematics have set the formula and I’m bring even more cautious than that formula would suggest, so I would almost have to be purposely doing it.’
Mathematics, it turns out, is the bedrock of the game. It’s the reason good players raise their opponents – despite the obvious risk to their stack of chips – when they choose to remain in a hand.
It’s the reason Mr Farrell bluffs by raising on occasional weak hands as well as strong ones. Simply, the maths clearly indicate it is the way to make money.
He admits to reservations about the way he earns his living. ‘There’s that little thing that sits with a lot of players, a slight bit of guilt.
‘How are you contributing to society? You’re not really, you know. I suppose I do end up spending my money in exorbi-tantly taxed shops.’
He is aware, too, of concerns about the gambling industry – that it fosters addiction which brings misery and penury to many.
Despite his vast winnings, Mr Farrell has a modest lifestyle and doesn’t even own a car
But poker, he suggests, is not the addict’s go-to game. Unlike roulette or blackjack, the rewards are too slow in coming.
And, while the gambling addict is all about risk, there is a paradoxical risk averseness about top level poker.
‘Professional poker players, especially the young European kids, they’re all very ana-lytical, they are looking for every edge.
‘The newer generation, these are the guys that are getting on flights at 6am because it saves them €200 even though they’re going to play a tournament with a €25,000 buy-in. These guys aren’t gambling on things they can’t win at.’
Mr Farrell allows himself occasional luxuries. On transatlantic flights, he’ll sometimes plump for business class.
On long nights away from his partner and child, he admits he and his poker buddies dine lavishly at some of the top Vegas restaurants.
But back home he is the enigmatic neighbour – the chap who walks his son to nurse-ry, appears to have no job to go and, nevertheless, seems to be doing very nicely for himself.
Thus far, the formula is clearly working.