Random picker
Paste names, one per line, and spin for a fair winner, or pick several at once. Need something quicker? Flip a coin or roll dice below.
Runs on your phone. The names are not uploaded or saved.
Flip a coin
Roll dice
How we keep it fair
Every pick, flip and roll uses crypto.getRandomValues, the random number generator browsers provide for security work, not the everyday Math.random.
A random number is turned into a choice without favouring the first names in the list: numbers that would make some names slightly more likely are thrown away and drawn again.
The winner is picked first and the wheel then turns to it. The spin is only a show, so turning off animations changes nothing.
If the same name or the same side of the coin comes up a few times in a row, that is what real chance looks like. See why in the probability puzzles, or test your gut against chance with the random wheel game.
Sources: MDN Web Docs on Crypto.getRandomValues() (a cryptographically strong random number generator in the browser); unbiased choice by rejection sampling and the Fisher–Yates shuffle, standard methods described in Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 2. The coin-run figure is exact counting: of the 1,024 possible results of 10 flips, 178 have no run of three, so 846 (82.6%) do. Nothing is sent from this page except your optional anonymous guess below.