Wheel Cue for Giveaways and Raffles

The problem is trust, not randomness

Picking a random name is trivial. Convincing four hundred people who did not win that the pick was clean is the actual job, and almost nothing about that job is technical.

What makes a draw credible:

• Rules published before the draw. How many winners, how duplicates are handled, what happens if a winner does not reply.
• A visible pool. The audience can see how many entries there were.
• One take. A cut in the recording is the first thing a sceptical audience notices.
• A record afterwards. Position, name, probability, timestamp — published, not just claimed.
• Nothing changed after the fact. Disqualifying a winner post-draw destroys more trust than any process gains.

Wheel Cue gives you the middle three. The first and last are yours.

Which tool for which draw

Drawing from a list of people → giveaway winner picker. Each entrant is a name, remove-after-spin is on by default so one person cannot take two prizes, and the winners log exports with timestamps.

Drawing from a book of tickets → raffle wheel. Numbers rather than names, preset ranges, and retired tickets stay retired.

Extra entries earning extra chances → either tool with Weighted choices on. Write @handle *5 rather than pasting the handle five times; the result window then reports that entrant's true probability, which is a much better answer to "why did they win".

What you can honestly claim

Precision here is worth more than a badge saying "provably fair".

True, and checkable: the winner is drawn with crypto.getRandomValues() before the animation begins; every entrant's probability is exactly their share of the wheel; modulo bias is removed by rejection sampling; the animation cannot change the outcome; and every result exposes its raw draw and arithmetic under How this result was picked.

Not true: that this is an audited or independently verifiable draw. Everything runs in your browser. Someone determined to fake a result could edit the entrant list between spins or simply not show the spins they did not like. No client-side tool can prevent that, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling.

So: more transparent than most things you will find for a casual draw. Not a substitute for a regulated process when the prize value or your jurisdiction requires one.

Running the draw on camera

• Fullscreen removes everything but the wheel — no menus, no ads, no browser chrome in your recording.
• Set the spin to Dramatic (eight seconds) in the wheel options. Five feels rushed on camera; more than eight and the room starts talking.
• Leave the sound on. The ticking tells viewers something is happening without you narrating.
• Show the entry count before you spin — it is on the strip under the wheel.
• Read the winner twice, once off the wheel and once off the result window, which stays up until you close it.
• Export the log afterwards with Copy in the winners panel and publish it.