Random Name Picker & Team Splitter

How to draw winners or split teams

1. Paste your names into the box, one per line. Extra whitespace and empty lines are stripped for you.
2. To pick winners, set the Winners count (1 to 50) and click Draw winners. One winner is announced directly; several come back as a numbered list.
3. To make teams instead, set the Teams count (2 to 20) and click Split into teams. Every name lands on exactly one team.
4. Click Copy result to grab the output for a chat message or email.

A worked example: 11 people into 3 teams

Paste 11 names and click Split into teams with the count at 3. The tool shuffles the full list once, then deals names round-robin like cards: first name to Team 1, second to Team 2, third to Team 3, fourth back to Team 1, and so on. Eleven does not divide by three, so the output reads Team 1 (4), Team 2 (4), Team 3 (3), with each team's members listed after the count. The extra people always land on the earlier teams, and the imbalance is never more than one person. If instead you ask for 3 winners from those 11, the same shuffle runs and the first three names off the top become your numbered winners, which guarantees three distinct people; nobody can be drawn twice in one draw.

Why this is fairer than most pickers

Both buttons rest on a single primitive: a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by crypto.getRandomValues. That combination makes every possible ordering of your list exactly equally likely, which is the mathematical definition of a fair draw. The code even uses rejection sampling to avoid modulo bias, a subtle flaw where naive random-number mapping favors names earlier in the list by a tiny margin. Nothing about the draw touches a server; you could run it offline. A practical tip from running standups and classroom picks: when you need a repeating rotation rather than a one-off draw, do one team split and screenshot it, because the tool intentionally has no memory. Every click is a fresh universe.

Honest limitations

No memory is also the main limitation. The tool does not track who won last week, so it cannot exclude recent winners for you; delete their lines by hand. Duplicate lines are legal and act as extra raffle tickets, which is a feature if you want weighting and a bug if someone pastes a list twice, so glance at your line count before a draw that matters. Winners are capped at 50 and teams at 20, and if you ask for more winners than there are names, you simply get everyone. Finally, the winner announcement is plain text on the page: there is no confetti animation, no drum roll, and no way for entrants to verify the draw beyond trusting whoever clicked the button.