Raffle Winner Picker
Pick fair random winners from a list of entries, supporting weighted tickets and multiple draws without replacement.
How does this calculator work?
Paste your entries one per line, optionally adding ",tickets" for weighted odds, and set how many winners to draw. The picker selects unique winners without replacement, where each entry’s chance equals its tickets divided by the total tickets. Change the seed to re-roll a fresh, reproducible draw.
Formula
How this is calculated
Enter one entry per line. A plain line like 'Alice' counts as a single ticket, while 'Alice,5' gives that entry five tickets and therefore five times the odds of a one-ticket entry. Blank lines and missing or non-positive ticket counts are ignored or default to one ticket.
The picker sums every entry's tickets into a total weight, then builds a cumulative-weight array. A random value between 0 and the total weight is generated; the winner is the entry whose cumulative range contains that value, so an entry's chance of being drawn equals its tickets divided by the total tickets. To draw multiple winners, the chosen entry is removed, the total is recomputed, and the process repeats until the requested number of unique winners is selected (sampling without replacement).
The draw seed makes results reproducible: the same entries and seed always yield the same winners, and changing the seed re-rolls a fresh draw. The number of winners is capped at the number of entries, and the displayed win chance for each entry reflects the single-draw probability before any removals.
Frequently asked questions
Write 'name,tickets' to give an entry more chances, for example 'Alice,5'. An entry with five tickets is five times as likely to win as an entry with one ticket. A name with no comma defaults to one ticket.
No. Winners are drawn without replacement, so once an entry is selected it is removed from the pool before the next winner is picked. You cannot draw more winners than there are entries.
Draws are reproducible for a given seed so results are auditable. Change the draw seed value to generate a new independent draw from the same list of entries.
Also known as
TG we-Calculate Editorial Team. (2026). Raffle Winner Picker [Online calculator]. TG we-Calculate. https://we-calculate.com/calculator/raffle-winner-picker
TG we-Calculate Editorial Team. "Raffle Winner Picker." TG we-Calculate. 2026. https://we-calculate.com/calculator/raffle-winner-picker.
TG we-Calculate Editorial Team, "Raffle Winner Picker," TG we-Calculate, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://we-calculate.com/calculator/raffle-winner-picker
@misc{wecalculate_raffle_winner_picker, title = {Raffle Winner Picker}, author = {{TG we-Calculate Editorial Team}}, howpublished = {\url{https://we-calculate.com/calculator/raffle-winner-picker}}, year = {2026}, note = {TG we-Calculate} }
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