{"id":619923,"date":"2026-08-04T12:56:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T12:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/619923\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T12:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T12:56:10","slug":"beginning-of-a-new-era-as-national-lottery-to-cut-two-balls-from-september","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/619923\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginning of a new era as National Lottery to cut two balls from September"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>THE NATIONAL LOTTERY has said that its \u201cenhanced format\u201d will take effect from next month.<\/p>\n<p>Last month, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thejournal.ie\/lotto-draw-dropping-two-balls-monday-7103830-Jul2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">the National Lottery announced<\/a> that it would be making one of the biggest changes to the Irish Lotto in years, cutting the number of balls from 47 to 45.<\/p>\n<p>This means numbers 46 and 47 have been effectively being retired from the game.<\/p>\n<p>This reverses a change that had been introduced in 2015, when the number of balls increased from 45 to 47.<\/p>\n<p>The other big change is a brand-new Monday night draw.<\/p>\n<p>The number of balls in the Lotto will reduce to 45 from Saturday, 5 September.<\/p>\n<p>A spokesperson said this will improve the odds of winning across every prize tier.<\/p>\n<p>The odds of winning the\u00a0Lotto\u00a0jackpot or top prize in each draw will improve \u2013 by a rather miniscule amount \u2013 from one in 10.7 million to one in 8.1 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Lottery bosses say the changes are designed to improve players\u2019 chances of winning while creating more jackpot winners.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the\u00a0Lotto\u00a0Plus Two top prize will increase from \u20ac250,000 to \u20ac1 million, creating even more opportunities to make new millionaires.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Combined with the existing \u20ac1 million Lotto Plus One prize, players who purchase Lotto Plus will now have three separate opportunities to become millionaires with every draw.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0Lotto\u00a0jackpot cap meanwhile will reduce from \u20ac19.06\u202fmillion to \u20ac16 million, and once the cap is reached, the existing \u201cMust Be Won\u201d roll-down mechanism will still apply after the fifth draw at the limit.<\/p>\n<p>And one element that is disappearing entirely is the Lotto Raffle, which will no longer form part of the game under the new format.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere, the new Monday draw will take place for the first time on 7 September.<\/p>\n<p>From this date, Lotto draws will take place every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>Each draw will continue to be livestreamed at 7.55pm on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lottery.ie\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">www.lottery.ie<\/a>\u00a0and broadcast before the RT\u00c9 Nine O\u2019Clock News on RT\u00c9 One.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, there are no changes to the price to play either\u00a0Lotto\u00a0or the\u00a0Lotto\u00a0Plus games.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THE NATIONAL LOTTERY has said that its \u201cenhanced format\u201d will take effect from next month. Last month, the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,261734,18,19,17,22175,22176,14729,14730],"class_list":["post-619923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-drop-the-ball","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-irish-lotto","tag-it-could-be-you","tag-lotto","tag-national-lottery"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117037354829127754","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}