Why use Random Choice Picker
This random choice picker takes a list you paste in, one entry per line, and draws one or more winners from it — built for raffles, giveaways, breaking a tie, or any situation where you need an unbiased pick from a set of options. Choose how many winners to draw and whether the same entry can win more than once, then read the result alongside a summary of how many options were in play.
How to get your result
- 1
Paste your list of options into the box, one entry per line.
- 2
Set How many winners to draw.
- 3
Tick 'Allow the same entry to win more than once' only if repeats should be possible.
- 4
Click Pick and read the winner or winners in the results panel.
Where this helps
Running a giveaway from a list of entrants
Paste every entrant's name, set the winner count to however many prizes you're giving away, and pick — with repeats off so no one wins twice.
Breaking a tie between options
When a group can't agree between a short list of choices, paste the options and draw one winner as a fair tiebreaker everyone can watch happen.
Assigning a random order or task
Paste a list of team members and draw them one at a time with repeats off to get a random, non-repeating order for presentations or chores.
Weighted picks by repeating entries
List a favoured option several times and everything else once, and the draw naturally favours it proportionally to how many lines it occupies.
How the draw stays unbiased
With repeats off, the picker performs a Fisher-Yates shuffle on the full option list and takes the first however-many entries as winners — the same shuffling approach used by the password generator to mix characters. That guarantees every possible ordering of the list is equally likely, which in turn means every entry has exactly the same chance of being drawn regardless of where it sits in the pasted list. With repeats allowed, each winner is drawn independently, so an entry can legitimately be picked more than once, exactly like drawing a name, replacing it, and drawing again.
Duplicate entries are treated as extra tickets, deliberately
The picker does not deduplicate your list before drawing. If a name appears on three lines, it effectively holds three tickets in the draw and is three times as likely to be picked as a name appearing once. This is a common, legitimate way to run a weighted lottery — sponsors, referrers or repeat entrants often earn extra entries — but it means an accidentally duplicated line changes the odds. Deduplicate your pasted list first if every entry is meant to have exactly equal odds.
Tips
- Turn repeats off for a raffle where each person should only be able to win once.
- Deduplicate your list first if you did not intend repeated lines to act as extra entries.
- Note the seed before a public draw if you may need to demonstrate afterward that the pick was fair.