Up to twelve runners take one lap of an oval track. Weights come in as boosters.
Auto cuts between shots as the race moves. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom. On auto it snaps back 3s after you let go; pick a shot and auto turns off, so your angle sticks. Double-click to return to the shot you picked.
On a real athletics track the outer lanes are longer, so runners start from staggered lines. This one does that correction in the maths instead — your position is measured as how far around your own lane you have come, so no lane is quicker or slower than another. Who wins is decided by the weights you set, and by nothing else.
When you are deciding who pays for dinner or who presents first, a result everyone watched happen tends to land better than "the app picked you."
Picking lunch, settling who buys the coffee, chore rotas, cleaning duty, presentation order — anything you would otherwise settle with a spinning wheel, a random name picker, or drawing straws. Type the names in and it draws again every time.
A runner with weight 3 wins exactly three times as often as a runner with weight 1. The win probability is that runner's weight divided by the total: give eight runners 3·1·2·1·2·1·1·1 and the first wins 25% of the time, a weight-1 runner 8.3%.
The race is how that result gets shown. The finishing order is drawn fairly first, and the race is staged so it lands that way. Finishers are 0.2–0.6s apart, close enough on screen to need a photo finish. The lead changes more than ten times a race, and one in three races is still undecided with three seconds left.
Boosters make the weighting visible. Weight three means three boosters, and every one of them is spent before the finish line. A booster genuinely speeds a runner up — 1.4× while lit, worth about a place and a half. It just does not decide the race. The draw already did that.
Every runner moves differently. Some sprint. Others crawl, walk on their hands, cartwheel, or simply roll down the track. Head shapes and builds are dealt out so no two runners look alike and stay that way. Shuffle gaits redraws how they move; Shuffle lanes redraws where they stand.
Nowhere. Everything is computed inside your browser, and no name or result is sent to a server. Refresh the page and it is gone.
Two to twelve. Add locks once twelve are in, and the track gains or loses lanes to match. Names take up to ten characters, and a race runs between one and five laps. More runners means a longer race, which is what the 2x and 4x buttons are for.
Yes — a name is only a label, and each row is a separate runner. If the point is to give someone twice the chance, though, a booster of 2 does it better than a second row: the odds come out the same, and the results board does not list the same name twice.
It takes that runner out of contention in practice. Internally a very small number is used rather than a true zero, so a field where everyone is set to 0 still has someone to draw. At the other end, weights go up to 99, but the boosters drawn on screen stop at six — any more in one race and the booster looks permanently lit. The odds still use the number you typed.
There is no save. Refresh and both the names and the result are gone, so a screenshot of the finishing board is the reliable way to keep one. There is no way to replay a particular race either — Reset draws again from scratch.
It does. Drag to swing the camera round, pinch to pull in and push out. It draws in 3D, so it needs a browser with WebGL; if an older device struggles, fewer runners makes it lighter.
How to run a draw people will accept
Where ladders, wheels and random buttons hold up or fall apart, and why this tool draws the order first.
When you need more than one pick — groups, running order, duplicates
Picking one name and settling an order are different problems, including past twelve people.