The short answer. Illinois Lotto is a six-from-50 jackpot game run by the Illinois
Lottery, drawn Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Matching all six main numbers takes the top prize. A
seventh number, the Extra Shot, is drawn from its own separate set and belongs to an optional add-on that
applies to the prizes below the jackpot — it has nothing to do with winning the jackpot itself.
How does Illinois Lotto work?
Illinois Lotto, read from our catalogue | Game | You pick | Drawn | Draw time |
|---|
| Illinois Lotto |
6 numbers from 1–50 + Extra Shot 1–25 |
Monday, Thursday and Saturday |
10:22 PM ET |
The main game is as plain as they come. Choose six different numbers between 1 and 50; six balls are drawn
from that same range on Monday, Thursday and Saturday evenings; match all six, in any order, and you have
the jackpot. Fifty balls is the largest pool of the six state games added to this site, which by itself
makes its jackpot the hardest of them to hit.
What complicates a first look at an Illinois result is the seventh figure sitting at the end of the row.
That is the Extra Shot, and reading it as part of the main draw is the single most common mistake people
make with this game.
Most recent Illinois Lotto draw on record: 22 Oct 2026 — 11, 14, 15, 38, 43, 48 + XS 24.
What is the Extra Shot, and does it change the odds?
The Extra Shot is an optional add-on to a play. The Illinois Lottery sets what it costs and what it does to
a prize, so neither figure appears on this site; what matters for reading a result is where it sits in the
draw and which prizes it can touch.
It comes from its own set of 25
The six main balls are drawn from 1 to 50. The Extra Shot is drawn separately, from a set of
25, and that separation has a visible consequence: because its ball was never removed
from the main pool, it can land on a number that has already come up among the six. A repeated figure in
an Illinois row is ordinary. In a straight six-ball game such as
New Jersey Pick 6 the same thing would mean a broken record.
It applies below the jackpot, not to it
The top prize is decided by the six main numbers alone. A ticket that matches all six wins it whether or
not an Extra Shot was added, and a ticket carrying an Extra Shot gains nothing towards it. The add-on
reaches only the lower prize tiers, which is why it cannot appear in any honest statement of jackpot
odds.
Why counting it would inflate the odds by a factor of 25
Treat the Extra Shot as a required seventh match and the arithmetic multiplies the real figure by
25, giving about
1 in 397,267,500 — an odds figure in the hundreds
of millions, in the territory of Powerball, for a single-state game whose
jackpot needs six balls out of fifty. That is a factor of 25 too pessimistic, and it is an
easy error to make from a results row alone.
Illinois Lotto top-prize odds: there are 15,890,700 ways to choose 6 numbers from 1–50, so matching all of them with one line is 1 in 15,890,700. This is arithmetic on the game’s format, not a claim about any draw.
The line above is computed from the format every time this page loads, and the calculation deliberately
ignores the Extra Shot. Compare it with a game whose bonus ball genuinely is part of the top prize —
the Star Ball in Lotto America, or the red ball in
Powerball — and the difference is not a detail of wording. In
those games the second pool multiplies the odds because the jackpot cannot be won without it. Here it
cannot.
Why 10:22 PM Eastern when Illinois says 9:22 PM Central?
Both are the same instant. Illinois runs on Central time, an hour behind New York, and its lottery
publishes the draw as a 9:22 PM Central event because that is the clock its players live on. This site
quotes 10:22 PM Eastern instead, and does so for one practical reason: every game in the state group is
listed in Eastern time, so the live clock on the results pages tells the truth for all of them at once.
Mixing zones inside one group would mean a clock that is right for Ohio and an hour out for Illinois.
Lotto Texas is quoted the same way for the same reason, and our
Lotto Texas guide makes the same point from the Texan side. If you are
in Illinois, subtract an hour from anything on this site. If you are in Dubai, Karachi or Chennai, the
distinction disappears entirely: both readings land in the middle of your night.
When does an Illinois Lotto result reach the UAE and India?
Illinois Lotto draw time where you are, converted for today | Game | Local draw time | UAE (GST) | India (IST) | Pakistan (PKT) | UK |
|---|
| Illinois Lotto |
10:22 PM ET |
6:22 AM (next day) |
7:52 AM (next day) |
7:22 AM (next day) |
3:22 AM (next day) |
Converted for 23 October 2026. US clocks change in March and November, which moves every US draw by an hour against the Gulf and India; this table is recalculated every time the page loads.
A late-evening American draw always lands on the following morning here, which makes the date the thing to
be careful about. Our archive files every draw under its Illinois date, so Saturday’s draw is filed as
Saturday even though nobody in the Gulf could have seen it before Sunday. The hour in that table also moves
twice a year, when US clocks change in March and November, and the table recalculates itself rather than
being written down. Every US game on the site is converted the same way in
US lottery draw times for India and the UAE.
Illinois draws on the same three nights as New Jersey Pick 6,
about half an hour earlier. For a reader following both, that is one morning check for two results, three
times a week.
How do I check an Illinois Lotto ticket?
- Open the Illinois Lotto results page and find the draw date on your ticket. Remember that your local date is probably a day ahead of it.
- Read only the six main numbers first. Count how many of your six appear among them, ignoring order completely.
- Now look at the Extra Shot number, which is labelled separately. It matters only if your play included the add-on, and only for prizes below the jackpot.
- If the same figure appears twice in the row, do not assume an error: the Extra Shot can duplicate a main number.
- Take the match count to the Illinois Lottery’s own prize table. We publish what was drawn, never what it pays.
- For an older draw, use the dated archive further down the same page.
Illinois shares a hub with the other single-state games we record, on
US state lottery results. The full list of every draw on the site
is on winning numbers, and
how to check results covers the general method, including what to do
when a published row and your ticket disagree.
We are not the Illinois Lottery. This is an independent results archive, unaffiliated with any
operator. We do not sell tickets or entries, we pay nothing, and we publish no prices, prize values or
multiplier amounts — the operator sets all of those and they vary by where you are. Treat any lottery
play as money spent, not money risked.
What the seventh number cannot tell you
Because the Extra Shot is drawn from a small set, its numbers repeat far more visibly than the main balls
do, and it is tempting to read something into that. There is nothing to read. It is one ball from a set of
25, drawn fresh each time, so the same figure appearing on two consecutive draw nights is
exactly as likely as any other pair and means exactly as much.
The same holds for the main six. Fifty balls generate millions of possible lines, every one of them equally
likely on every night, and no amount of archive makes the next draw more predictable. Our
lucky numbers page publishes frequency counts because readers ask for them, and
publishes alongside them what happened when that approach was measured against random picking: nothing. The
longer argument is in
do jackpot guessing numbers work.
