Niall Farrell is the Scottish poker king of Las Vegas

A quiet town in the south of Scotland is a long way from the bright lights of Las Vegas.

Yet Niall Farrell is happy to move between these two worlds as Scotland’s top professional poker player.

His adventures were recently featured in the documentary Four Rules of Poker Kings.

How did the 36-year-old actor navigate his journey from growing up in Dumfries to making and losing his fortune around the world?

Poker takes him to tournaments like Monte Carlo, Prague and the United States, but he’s happy to have his base in the small Scottish town he calls home.

“I think it’s nice to know everything about the town you’re in — the good points and the bad points,” he explained.

“This is my city, you know that right?”

Niall, like many others in the UK, became interested in poker thanks to Channel 4’s Late Night Poker programme.

“I think when I was 14 I stayed up to watch wrestling and there was poker going on late at night,” he said.

“It gets pretty boring when you watch poker without any knowledge.

“It was the first show where they had little glass squares on the tables so you had the whole board camera so you could see what people had.”

It wasn’t until he started studying employment law at Stirling that he started playing the game with his flatmates and then online.

Over time, he started to improve his game.

“I don’t know if it’s a little bit of arrogance or just confidence or something,” he says.

“But if I put in the time for something and enjoy it, which is really important to me, I think I’ll be pretty good at it.”

But he freely admits that it was “very bad” in the beginning.

“I thought I got good pretty quickly, but I was wrong and once I started I was soon humbled,” he said.

“But then you get a little humble and then you can start to rebuild.

“About when I graduated, I was at a point where I was like, OK, I’m going to try and do this professionally.”

He said he was lucky that his parents were happy to give him the freedom to make his own mistakes.

Not that it went smoothly.

“I was so close to quitting; I was going through a bad spell,” he explained.

“I also borrowed money from my girlfriend at the time.”

By the time he participated in an online tournament about 10 days later, he had given himself about two more weeks before recovering.

He won through “cosmic power” or “complete blind randomness” and raised $33,000 in the process.

“I was able to repay my girlfriend and become stronger and stronger,” he said.

That’s an understatement for a man whose career earnings now run into the millions and is one of the few players to win the game’s “triple crown.”

The BBC documentary chronicles the ups and downs of his return to poker after taking a break for the birth of his son.

Despite his skills, he reflects both the pleasure of winning and the pain of losing.

“You’re completely numb,” he admitted.

“I try to keep myself away from people for about 30 minutes because I know at that point you’re just saying and doing stupid things.”

So what does he think makes him good at the game?

“I’ve always been pretty good with numbers in general,” he said.

“A lot of it is pretty deep math, which is less flashy than what James Bond makes it look like.

“There is an element of psychology, especially when playing live.”

Next up could be a trip to Cyprus in a few weeks or a big World Poker Tour event in Las Vegas.

But in the meantime, he is happy to be in Dumfries with his partner Edita and son Ruairi, without feeling the need to buy a “huge house”.

“We would have lost the little guy in one of the 18 bedrooms,” he joked. “This just doesn’t feel like home to me.”

Instead, he’s happy with a nice house and playpen overlooking the front door and the “peace” that can come from not having to worry about money.

Niall thinks his Dumfries upbringing plays a part in this attitude.

“It helps you get grounded in the beginning,” he explained. “You can’t rise above your station, so to speak.

“And I don’t know if it’s a Scottish thing, but if bad things are happening you roll with the punches.”

This helped him rise to the top of a game he still enjoys.

Even though he’s in Las Vegas, he sometimes wishes he could go back to his hometown in Scotland.