Random Picker and Number Generator

What a random picker does that choosing in your head cannot

Ask someone to pick a person at random and you get whoever spoke last, whoever is sitting opposite, or whoever has the easiest name to say. Numbers fare no better: asked for one between 1 and 10, people do not spread their answers evenly. Slips of paper in a hat are fair, but they cost you preparation and someone trustworthy to hold the hat.

This page turns that into one button. Paste a list, press Draw, and the list is reshuffled before the top entries come off it, which is the same thing as cutting a properly shuffled deck. It can also produce numbers in a range you choose, split a list into teams, or run a prize draw for a party, working through each prize and its number of winners without anyone winning twice.

Where the randomness comes from

Every draw uses crypto.getRandomValues(), the browser’s cryptographic random source, feeding a Fisher-Yates shuffle: walk the list from the last position backwards, swapping each entry with a randomly chosen position at or before it, and every possible ordering ends up equally likely. That is a stronger guarantee than the common one-liner of sorting a list by Math.random(), which is measurably biased toward some orderings.

The rolling names, the lottery balls popping up one by one, the tumbling dice and the flipping cards are only a show. The result is fixed the moment you press the button, and the animation cannot change where it lands. If your device is set to reduce motion, the result appears straight away, and Skip animation does the same thing on demand.

Which of the four modes fits the job

• Pick from a list: you have names or options written down and want some of them chosen. Cold calling in class, a giveaway, who buys coffee, where to eat, a card off a deck.
• Random numbers: you want numbers rather than names. Give a lowest value, a highest value and how many to draw; both ends of the range can come up.
• Split into teams: everyone on the list has to end up somewhere and nobody is left over. Group projects, pickup teams, seating charts, a chore schedule.
• Prize draw: several prizes, each with a number of winners, drawn one at a time with no repeat winners. Holiday parties, raffles at a fundraiser, door prizes at a conference.

The two switches people get wrong

• Allow the same number twice: leave it off and each number appears once at most, which is what lottery-style numbers and seat numbers need. Turn it on and every pick is independent, which is what dice and spinners do, since the same face can and should repeat.
• Fixed number of teams against max per team: pick the first when you know how many teams you want, such as four presentation groups. Pick the second when the cap is a capacity, such as four seats per car, and the tool works out how many teams that needs before spreading people evenly.

Settings lookup for common draws

Walkthrough: cold calling and prize draws

1. Choose Pick from a list and paste your own names, one per line, or press Fill in an example to try it first. Blank lines are skipped, so a column pasted out of a spreadsheet needs no cleaning up.
2. Set How many to the number you want out. Ask for more than the list holds and you get everyone back in shuffled order, which is a neat way to set a speaking order.
3. Press Draw. Results appear as large cards, and each press is an independent draw rather than a continuation of the last one.
4. Running several prizes with no repeat winners? Switch to Prize draw, which takes each winner out of the pool as soon as they are drawn.
5. The recent list underneath keeps your last few setups, so one click restores the same list without pasting it again.

Walkthrough: a prize draw for a party or event

1. Choose Prize draw and paste the entrants, one per line. A column copied out of a spreadsheet works as is, and the counter underneath shows how many people are still in the draw.
2. Fill in one row per prize: its name, how many winners it has and, if you like, what each one is worth. List the top prize first and the smallest last, and add rows as needed (Enter in the winners box adds one). A line underneath totals the prizes and winners and warns you if there are more winners than entrants. Fill in an example shows how it looks; if you already typed a list, it asks first and can be undone for 20 seconds.
3. Press Draw one. Names roll like a slot machine for about three seconds, land on the winner and set off a little confetti. The first prize on the list rolls for about seven seconds and slows down at the end; untick the suspense option if you would rather not wait. For a prize with many winners, draw the rest of that prize in one go.
4. Winners leave the pool automatically, so nobody can win twice and you never have to delete names by hand.
5. When you are done, copy the winners as text or download a CSV that opens in Excel with one row per winner.

Smallest prize first, top prize last

Most parties save the biggest prize for the end so people stay to the last draw, and that is the default here: the draw starts from the bottom of your list and works up. Switch the draw order to Top prize first if you would rather open with it. When someone announces a surprise extra, add a bonus prize and it becomes the very next draw.

Two people with the same name

Names that appear more than once are listed as soon as you paste the entrants. If a name was pasted twice by mistake, merge the duplicates. If they really are two people, keep both lines: winners are numbered in list order, like Chris Lee (1) and Chris Lee (2), on the screen, in the copied text and in the CSV. Writing Chris Lee (Sales) in the list works even better.

When a winner is not in the room

Press Not here, redraw next to their name. The spot is redrawn from people who have not won yet, and the absent winner stays in the record, marked as not here, without going back into the pool. Pressed it by mistake? Undo within 20 seconds puts the original winner back. Announce beforehand how long a winner has to come forward so nobody argues about it on the night.

Putting it on a projector

Press Full screen with the laptop connected to the projector. The screen keeps only the current prize, the spots left, the rolling names and the winner, in very large type. Space, Enter or the next-slide button on a presentation clicker draws the next winner, and pressing again while the names roll skips straight to the result. Press Esc to leave. When a prize has dozens of winners, the names switch to as many columns as it takes to fit one screen, even on a 1280×720 projector; only a very long list is split into pages, and then the clicker turns the page before it draws the next prize. A refresh halfway through loses nothing: the lists and winners are kept in the browser tab until you close it, and the page opens on a note saying how far the draw got and who was drawn last, flagged if their name was still rolling and has not been announced. Clear everything and Clear winners ask for a second, separate confirmation and can be undone for 20 seconds.

Walkthrough: random numbers and dice rolls

1. Choose Random numbers and set the lowest and highest values. Both ends of the range can be drawn, so 1 to 49 includes both 1 and 49.
2. Set how many numbers you want. For a lottery-style set, check that allow the same number twice is off, since a single line of numbers with a duplicate in it is usually not a valid entry.
3. For dice, set the range to 1 to 6, turn repeats on and draw one number per die. Spinners work the same way.
4. Press Draw. Numbers come out in shuffled order, not sorted low to high, so sort them yourself if the form expects ascending order.
5. For several sets, press again and copy after each press. The tool does not remember earlier sets and will not avoid repeating them.

Walkthrough: splitting a list into teams

1. Choose Split into teams and paste the list, one name per line.
2. Pick how to split: fixed number of teams when you know how many you want, or max people per team when the cap is what matters.
3. Type the number and press Draw. Each team comes back as a card listing its members and its size.
4. When the numbers do not divide evenly the spare people go to the earliest teams, so sizes never differ by more than one. Press again to reshuffle the whole list from scratch.
5. To show the class, press Full screen: each team gets its own card and the names are sized to fill the screen, so the back row can read them on a classroom TV.
6. If some people must not be together, place those few by hand first, then paste the remainder and split that into the teams you still need. The tool takes no constraints of its own.

Getting the result out: copy, announce, keep a record

• Copy all: the button at the top right of the result card copies one entry per line, ready for Slack, email or a spreadsheet column.
• Copying teams: the team result copies as one line per team, in the form Team 1: Ana, Ben, Chidi, ready to post into a group chat.
• Prize draw results: Copy winners gives one line per prize, and the CSV download has prize, number, winner, value and note columns. It opens cleanly in Excel, people with the same name are numbered, and absent winners are listed with a note that their spot was redrawn.
• Announce it live: for anything with a prize, use full screen or share your screen and press the button while people watch. A list of names posted afterwards carries far less weight.
• Keep evidence: screenshot the page, since the list and the result are on screen together.

How spreadsheets, wheel sites and giveaway pickers differ

• Spreadsheets: Excel and Google Sheets both offer RAND() and RANDBETWEEN(), and both recalculate on almost any edit, so a winner drawn in a cell can change before you have written it down. Paste the value as text right away.
• Spinning wheel sites: a wheel is the same draw with an animation on top. It plays better on a stream, and it slows down once the list runs past a few dozen entries.
• Platform giveaway tools: comment pickers pull entrants through a social platform API and can filter by follow date or comment text, which a paste box cannot. Export those entrants one per line and you can still draw them here.

Limits and things worth knowing

• It cannot improve your odds: in a fair lottery every combination is equally likely, so generated numbers win no more often than numbers you pick yourself. This solves not knowing what to write down, not winning.
• Results cannot be reproduced: there is no seed and no server-side record, so closing the tab discards the draw. Copy or download anything you need to keep.
• Limits on number draws: with repeats off you can draw at most every number in the range; with repeats on a single draw is capped at one thousand numbers. Larger requests are clamped to those limits.
• Team splits take no rules: the split is random and even, with no support for keeping people together or apart, and asking for more teams than people leaves empty teams.
• Not a notarized draw: nothing here certifies the outcome. Where a promotion is regulated, follow the process your rules require.