Lotto

Yes, you too can tap into the luck of the Irish when you play the Ireland Lotto game, also known as the Irish National Lottery. Since 1986, the An Post National Lottery Company (the Irish Lottery Commission) has been creating millionaires in the island nation and has to date raised more than €3,000,000,000 to help the Irish government pay for the cost of running a modern nation.

Of course, they’ve also given away huge chunks of money, give that the Irish Lottery gives away a minimum of €2,000,000 every time someone wins the jackpot (it’s actually a progressive jackpot, meaning that the amount of money you can win keeps going up depending on how long it’s been since someone won the jackpot before you).

The Irish Lottery also runs a number of other games, including Monday Million game, Euro Millions (the multi-national game), Millionaire Raffle, Tell Bingo, Lotto Plus 1, Lotto Plus 2 and Lotto 5-4-3-2-1 in addition to the popular Irish National Lottery game, which takes place twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday.

Game Type

The Irish Lotto game is a hybrid of the double matrix games (like the American Powerball game) which are becoming increasingly popular today and traditional lottery games. Winning the jackpot in the Irish National Lottery means picking the correct 6 numbers out of a pool of 45 possible choices.

However, in order to increase the number of prizes available, the Irish National Lottery recently started offering a secondary, bonus number which is used to determine winners of the second, third and 6^th prizes. Winning the third, fifth and seventh prizes just rely on correctly guessing 5, 4 or 3 of the primary numbers respectively.

Who Can Play

Tickets are available for the Ireland Lotto game online from a number of online retailers and they are of course also sold at kiosks throughout the Irish Republic. Anyone can play, regardless of where they happen to live in the world or whose citizenship they hold as long as they are over the age of 18 at the time they purchase their tickets.

Odds of Winning

The odds of winning the jackpot in the Irish National Lottery game are 1 in 8,140,000. Second prize odds are 1 in 1,350,000 and third prize odds are 1 in 34,808. Fourth prize odds are 1 in 28,579, fifth place odds are 1 in 733, sixth place odds are 1 in 755 and seventh place odds are just 1 in 45 for the Irish National Lottery game.