Running a raffle with thousands of entries

At some point a raffle stops being a wheel with eight names on it. You export a signup sheet, paste in 4,000 rows, and hit a question nobody thinks about until they're staring at it: a circle simply doesn't have room for 4,000 readable labels. On a 600-pixel wheel, 1,000 slices is already less than two pixels of arc each, thinner than the line between them.

So what should a wheel do with a list that big? There are three possible answers, and only one of them is honest.

The three ways to handle a huge list

The first is to render everything anyway. This is the honest-but-useless option: the browser grinds, the labels become a grey smear, and you've drawn 4,000 shapes nobody can read. Nothing is unfair about it, but nothing is gained either.

The second is to ask you to trim your list: 'wheels work best with under 100 entries'. This is the option to be suspicious of, because it quietly makes the draw wrong. Every name you delete to make the picture nicer is a person removed from the raffle. The wheel looks fairer and is less fair.

The third is to keep the entire list and show a random part of it. That's what SpinOfLuck does past about 1,000 slices: the wheel displays a random 1,000 of your entries, and reshuffles which 1,000 are shown before every spin. Nobody is removed from anything. The full list is still the draw; the wheel is just the window onto it.

Why a partial view is still a fair draw

This is the part worth understanding, because it's the question your entrants will ask: if my name isn't on the wheel, how can I win?

Two things have to be true, and they're both simple. First, the 1,000 shown are a genuinely random sample of your list, not the first 1,000, not the shortest names, not whoever signed up earliest. Second, the sample is redrawn before each spin and never in response to the result, so what's on screen can't be influenced by who's about to win.

Given those, the arithmetic is one line. Your chance of being on the wheel for a given spin is 1,000 ÷ N. Your chance of winning once you're on it is 1 ÷ 1,000. Multiply them and the thousand cancels: 1 ÷ N. Exactly the odds you'd have on a wheel with infinite room. Not approximately, not close enough, but identically.

The wheel says so on screen too: with a big list you'll see a line under it reading 'Showing 1,000 of 4,000 entries', with the reason. Say the same thing out loud before you spin and the question stops coming up.

Getting a big list in

• Paste directly from a spreadsheet column, one entry per line. Thousands of rows paste fine.
• Deduplicate first if your signup form allowed repeat submissions, unless repeat entries were meant to count as extra chances.
• Strip surrounding columns (emails, timestamps) before pasting. Long labels don't hurt the draw, but they make the winner announcement harder to read out.
• Decide up front whether partial names are enough. 'Sarah M.' is friendlier to announce publicly than a full name and address, and it's better privacy practice for a public stream.

Multiple tickets: weights, not duplicate rows

Most big raffles aren't one-entry-per-person. Someone bought five tickets, someone else earned three entries by sharing. You can paste five identical rows, but you'll never be able to check it afterwards; five 'Alice' lines scattered through 4,000 rows are impossible to audit by eye.

Use the weight syntax instead: 'Alice*5' gives Alice five slices from one readable row. The Weights tab shows each entrant's percentage share, which is the number you actually want to verify before drawing. Per-entry weights go up to ×1,000, which covers everything from a five-ticket raffle to a 'nearly always try again' prize wheel. Ask for more than the cap and the editor tells you it reduced the weight; it will not silently change the odds you declared.

Drawing more than one winner

Big raffles usually have a prize table, not a single winner. Two settings cover it. 'Pick N winners per spin' draws up to 20 winners in one sequence, excluding each name as it's picked. 'Remove winner from wheel after spin' does the same across separate spins, which is what you want when you're announcing each prize before drawing the next.

Draw in prize order, biggest first, and announce each one before moving on. It reads better live, and it means that if you have to stop halfway you've allocated the prizes that matter most.

Running the draw so nobody doubts it

1. Publish the entry list, or its total count, before you draw. A number nobody can check afterwards is the weakest part of most giveaways.
2. Show the entry count on screen at the start; the wheel displays it, including the full total when it's showing a window.
3. Explain the window in one sentence before spinning: 'it shows a thousand at a time and reshuffles between spins, everyone has the same chance'. Said in advance it's a fun detail; said afterwards it sounds like an excuse.
4. Draw live, or record it in one unbroken take. A recording that cuts at the moment of the spin is worth nothing.
5. Export the results and keep them with the entry list.

None of this is about the randomness being weak; it's cryptographic, and there's a whole page explaining it. It's about the draw being checkable by someone who wasn't there and has no reason to trust you.