Random Teams: The Chance You End Up With Your Best Friend
Split 12 people into 3 random teams of 4 and there are 5,775 possible line-ups. The chance two friends land on the same team is 27%. Here is the maths for other group sizes.
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How to Pick a Giveaway Winner Fairly (and Prove It)
A step-by-step way to run a social media giveaway draw that is fair, transparent and easy to prove, using a random wheel and a screen recording.
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Raffle Odds Explained: How Much Do Extra Tickets Really Help?
With 100 tickets and 3 prizes, holding 5 tickets gives you a 14.4% chance of winning something, not 15%. Here is a simple table of raffle odds.
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Secret Santa Draws: There Is a 63% Chance Someone Picks Themselves
Drawing names from a hat for Secret Santa? In a group of 5 or more, about 63% of draws have at least one person pulling their own name. Here is the maths and a fix.
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Coin vs Dice vs Online Wheel: Which Is the Fairest Way to Decide?
A study of 350,757 real coin flips found coins land on the side they started on 50.8% of the time. Here is how coins, dice and online wheels compare for fairness.
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Ask Someone for a Random Number and They Will Probably Say 7
In a classic study, 28% of people asked for a random digit from 0 to 9 chose 7, almost three times what chance would give. Here is why humans make poor random number generators.
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Let a Coin Decide? What a Study of 22,511 Coin Tosses Found About Big Decisions
An economist asked thousands of undecided people to flip a coin about a big decision. Those told to make a change were more likely to do it and, six months later, happier.
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Why the Same Name Keeps Winning: Random Looks Less Random Than You Think
Spin a 10-name wheel 10 times and there is a 62% chance the same name wins twice in a row at least once. Streaks and repeats are what real randomness looks like.
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How Many Spins Until Everyone Gets Picked? The Numbers Might Surprise You
With 10 names on a wheel, it takes about 29 spins on average before everyone has been picked at least once, and 1 time in 10 it takes 44 or more. Here is the full table.
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We Spun the Wheel 1,000,000 Times. Here Is How Fair It Is
We ran one million spins of a 10-name wheel using the same secure random generator our wheel uses. Every name won between 99,470 and 100,597 times, within 0.6% of a perfect split.
