Play Irish Lottery Online - Easy and Safe!

The state lottery of Ireland is named the National Lottery. When the government of Ireland passed the National Lottery act in 1986 the National Lottery of Ireland was founded to support initiatives financially considering recreation and sport, welfare and health, national heritage as well as the Irish language. Another point which was added in 2013 was the natural environment - in times of climate crisis this is just logical. The first game of the National Lottery of Ireland began in 1987 March with the common scratchcards. In 1988 March, one year later, the popular drawing game Lotto was initialized. Today there are three types of drawing games in the Irish Lottery: Lotto, Daily Million and EuroMillions. But the Irish Lottery is also responsible for bingo and game shows in TV as well as some millionaire raffles every year. You can play the games of the Irish Lottery online or by buying a ticket in the retail store. By choosing the more comfortable way to play Lotto, via the Internet, you have to make sure to use a secure provider.

Game Principle and Winning Classes

In November 2006 there was a format change by the intention to create bigger jackpots. In fact, the format was changed to 6 in 45. The initial jackpot was doubled for another time to €2 million and the price for five matching numbers plus the bonus number was more than doubled from 12,000€ - 25,000€. There was also the price for three matching numbers introduced - the negative side of these changes was the increasing line price from one euro to 1.50€. This is the current game principle with the following odds of winning in the several winning classes: The first winning class consists of all numbers matching at an odd of winning from one in 8,145,060. The second class, you need five matching numbers and the bonus number to get in, has the odds of winning of one in 1,357,510. The odds of winning for five matching numbers are one in 35,724, the odds for four matching numbers and the bonus number are one in 40,290, the odds of winning for only four matching numbers are one in 772 and the odds of winning for three matching numbers and the bonus number are one in 579. The last class, namely the seventh one, is reachable by three matching numbers with an odd of winning of one in 48.

There are also some additional lotteries: Lotto Plus will allow the player to gain a second chance for its chosen numbers for another 25p (now 0.5 euros) in another drawing but only with the non-rollover jackpot. The other lottery, Lotto 5-4-3-2-1, allows the player to gain a prize by correctly matching one, two, three, four or five matching numbers. The higher the matching numbers the higher the prize.

Irish Lottery Rules and Conditions

Similar to other lotteries you have to be at least 18 years old to participate in the Irish lottery online. You can also play it from abroad, most likely via the Internet, which is in every case the most comfortable way to play Lotto. After the drawing you have got three months (90 days) to claim your prize.

The History of Irish Lottery

With the first Lotto drawing on Saturday, 16 April 1988 the original format six in 36 was introduced - this just means, that six numbers have to match the drawn balls from lottery machine which contains 36 balls. When all six numbers matches, the player would have won a guaranteed jackpot of £250,000, prizes were smaller if the amount of the matching numbers was lower. Similar to some other lotteries there was also a rollover, so if there was no winning ticket, the jackpot was added to the next draw. Every Saturday night there was a drawing, from the 30 May in 1990 on there was also the Wednesday night's lottery draw.

With the format of six in 36 comes a specific chance of winning, which is one in 1,947,792 if all six numbers match. If you now look at the price of 50p per line, you could purchase all combinations for £973,896. It's obvious, that someone can use a brute force attack if the jackpot was higher than this amount of money - which was the case in May 1992 - the bank holiday drawing. A group of businessmen won all prices by buying 80% of all possible combinations. Unfortunately there have been two other jackpot winning tickets, but with the second and third prizes the overall amount of money once was £1,166,000 which represents a profit of £310,000.

In order to prevent a brute force attack in future the game format was changed to 6 in 39 in 1992. With this format, the jackpot winning odds raised to 1 in 3,262,623. The first drawing with the new format was held on 22 August in 1992. By doubling the initial jackpot to £500,000 and adding a bonus number to the drawing the jackpot winning odd was compensated by the National Lottery. And with that changes it was possible to win a price with three matching numbers and the bonus number - with the old format the prices had begun by four matching numbers.

The third big format change was on 24 September in 1994 where Lotto 6 in 39 was changed to 6 in 42. This change was made to gain a higher rollover jackpot caused by the now higher odds of winning namely one in 4,245,786. The main reason this change was made was to prevent people living near the border to Northern Ireland abandon Lotto with the beginning operations of the British National Lottery. With these changes there also comes another method of choosing numbers: From now on it was also possible to buy some computer-generated quick picks - for some retailers this is the only option now. The next change was made on 26 December 1998, when the costs of one Lotto line increased from 50p to 75p. To compensate this step, the starting jackpot was again doubled to £1 million and the prices of the smaller games were also increased by 50%. In 2002 the euro was introduced so that the price for Lotto was rounded to 1 euro for each line. The starting jackpot was also raised to 1,350,000 €.