How an item gets chosen
Every line becomes an item with a weight, one by default. The weights are added up, a single uniform value is drawn over that total, and the item whose cumulative band contains the value wins. With all weights at one this reduces to an equal chance for each line. The uniform value comes from crypto.getRandomValues() built into a full-precision fraction, not from a small integer scaled up, so fractional weights are honoured exactly rather than snapped to a grid.
Drawing several without repeats removes each winner from the pool and draws again from what is left. That is the same distribution as choosing the whole subset at once, so no position in your list is advantaged by being drawn earlier or later. With repeats allowed, every draw is independent and the same item can come out twice in a row.
Writing weights
Add a multiplier to the end of a line and it takes effect: Diego*2, Diego x2 and Diego × 1.5 all parse. Weights are relative, so A*2 with B*1 is identical to A*4 with B*2. Fractions work, which is useful when a weight is really a share: three lines at 0.5, 0.3 and 0.2 read as percentages and behave as them.
| Written as | Weight | Chance in a five-item list of ones |
|---|---|---|
Ana | 1 | 1 in 5, or 20% |
Diego*2 | 2 | 2 in 6, or 33% |
Diego x 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 in 4.5, or 11% |
One trap: a line ending in a number that is not meant as a weight, such as Bay 3, will be read as Bay with weight 3 only if there is a multiplier symbol between them. Bay 3 stays a single item named "Bay 3"; Bay x3 does not.
Duplicate lines are separate items
Two lines reading Ana are two items, and Ana therefore has twice the chance. Sometimes that is what you want and it is the crudest way to weight a list. Often it is a copy-paste accident. If your list came out of a spreadsheet, run it through line tools to strip duplicates and blank lines before drawing.
When a screen draw is not enough
Nothing is stored, so a draw exists only in the moment. That is fine for who fetches the coffee and useless for anything contested. A person who was not looking over your shoulder has no way to tell a genuine draw from a rerun that kept going until a convenient name appeared, and a screenshot only shows the run you chose to keep. If the outcome allocates money, prizes, or scarce places, either draw physically in front of the people affected, or publish the entrant list and a commitment to a seed first and compute the result afterwards where everyone can check the arithmetic. Convenience and verifiability are different properties, and this page only offers the first.
Questions people ask
The same name keeps coming up. Is it stuck?
Draws are independent, so runs happen. In a ten-item list, the same item winning three times in a row has about a one in a thousand chance, which anyone drawing repeatedly through the day will see. The Source line tells you which generator produced it; the distribution itself is flat.
What if I ask for more items than the list holds?
Without repeats the count is reduced to the list length, which gives you the entire list in random order. That is a reasonable way to set a running order. With repeats allowed there is no such limit, up to the cap of 100 draws.
Do weights still apply when drawing without repeats?
Yes, but they only shape the order. Every item eventually comes out if you draw enough of them, so a heavier weight means it tends to appear earlier rather than more often.
How long a list can I paste?
Two thousand items. Beyond that the extra lines are ignored and the result says so.