About Horse Race Picker

Horse Race Picker is a single-purpose web tool made by an independent developer based in the UK. It turns a list of names into a random race — horses, ducks, cars or marbles — and shows you the finishing order. A separate page deals out a real race field for an office sweep.

Why it exists

Most "fun" random name pickers either want an account, hide the actual picker behind a wall of adverts, only exist as a phone app, or are one page of a huge site that loads slowly on a classroom laptop. Teachers, raffle hosts and streamers just want to paste names and press a button. This site is that button.

Principles

• Fair by construction. Every entry gets an equal chance, and the result is drawn before the animation starts. (Technically: a Fisher–Yates shuffle driven by crypto.getRandomValues; the race then plays out that order, so the screen, the frame rate and the lanes cannot change it.) No weighting, no "house" horse.
• Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. It is a web page.
• Your data stays yours. Names are never uploaded. They are kept in your browser's local storage only so your list is still there tomorrow.
• Lightweight. Plain web pages with no frameworks and nothing to install. It runs in any up-to-date browser on a laptop, tablet or phone.

What it is not

It is not a betting or gambling tool. It never takes money, sets odds or accepts wagers.

The site has two kinds of tool, and they work differently:

• The race pickers (horse, duck, car, marble, fantasy draft order) pick names from your list. The runners are cartoons and have nothing to do with any real race.
• The Melbourne Cup sweep is built around a real event: it deals the real Cup field out to a list of people and works out the prize split for an office sweep. The winner is decided by the real race on the day, not by this site, and any money stays with you.

What is live now

• Race pickers: horse, duck, car and marble, all on the same engine. Your list follows you between them.
• Fantasy draft order: the full order from first pick to last.
• Melbourne Cup sweep: deals the real field out to an office and does the prize arithmetic.

Roadmap

• Classroom pack: an offline file with several saved class lists, a projector mode and printable results. Not on sale yet.
• More race themes, chosen by what people actually search for.
• Embeddable version for slides and websites.

Contact

Suggestions and bug reports are welcome on the contact page.