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Name picker wheel alternative

Spinning wheels are slow when you have to pick more than one person — paste your list and split into teams or pairs in a click.

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Use case

When to use this

Teachers and trainers who used to use a spinner to pick one name at a time, then realised they were spending five minutes per round. Generating teams or pairs in one shot is faster and fairer.

How to use it

Step by step

  1. 1

    Paste names

  2. 2

    Pick mode

    Pairs, teams, or per-team size.

  3. 3

    Generate

When wheels make sense

Picking exactly one person (a winner, a volunteer). Anything beyond one — splitting, pairing, breakouts — is faster with a generator.

Same privacy as a wheel

Like the better spinners, this runs entirely in your browser. Names never reach a server.

What 'fair' actually means here

When we say a split is fair we mean two specific things. First, team sizes differ by at most one — never by two — regardless of how the headcount divides. Second, in skill-balanced mode the total rating per team stays within roughly one rating point of the average. Those are mathematical guarantees of the algorithm, not marketing language. If you want to verify, generate the same input twice with different seeds: the per-team totals will land in the same narrow band each time. Pure-random mode trades that balance for surprise — useful when the ratings are noisy or the activity is recreational. Read the full algorithm description on the methodology page if you want the snake-draft maths.

Practical tips before you paste

Three small habits make the output noticeably better. (1) Strip leading numbers and bullets from your list — paste plain names, one per line, so the parser doesn't treat '1. Alex' as a name. (2) If you have ratings, append them after the name with a space, e.g. 'Alex 4'. The generator accepts integers and decimals from 1 to 10. (3) Decide up-front whether absentees should be excluded or kept as ghosts. Excluding gives tighter teams; keeping them lets you swap names back in later without regenerating. The 'Copy as text' button preserves your line order so you can edit and re-paste.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can I pick one random name?

Yes — paste names and split into 1 team of N, then take the top of the list. Or just shuffle and pick the first.

Is anything sent to your servers?

No. The team generator runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. The names you paste are kept in component memory only and are never transmitted, logged, or persisted unless you explicitly export them. Closing the tab clears the data. See the privacy and methodology pages for the technical detail.

Can I lock specific people onto the same team?

Yes. After generating, click any name to swap it with another, or use drag and drop in the team panel. For one-off groupings (siblings, carpool partners) this is the fastest path. For repeated locks across many regenerations, give the locked group a shared rating that's slightly above average and use balanced mode — they'll cluster together most of the time.

Why do I sometimes get the same split twice?

On very small inputs (under ~10 names) there are only a handful of mathematically distinct splits, so repeats are inevitable. The shuffle is cryptographically random — it's just that the space of valid outputs is small. Either add more names or accept the duplicate; either is fine.

Keep exploring

Related tools & guides

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