How The Draw Is Kept Honest
Every league has the same argument. The commissioner runs the draft order on their own computer, announces the result, and somehow ends up with a pick they’re happy about. Nobody genuinely thinks they cheated. Everybody makes the joke anyway, and it never fully goes away.
The fix isn’t a promise, it’s arithmetic. This tool lets you publish proof of the result before anyone can see what the result is.
Commit, then reveal
The whole race — every horse, every lead change, the finishing order — is a pure function of a single 128-bit number called the seed. Draw the field and the outcome is already decided; the animation is just the seed being played back.
That makes a commitment possible. Before the gate opens, the tool gives you a SHA-256 fingerprint of the draw: a 64-character string that is derived from the seed but reveals nothing about it. You post that fingerprint in the league chat. Afterwards you hand over the seed itself, and anyone can re-run it and check that it produces both the same finishing order and the same fingerprint.
The commissioner therefore cannot re-roll for a better pick. Any second attempt produces a different seed, a different fingerprint, and a hash their league is already holding that no longer matches. The cheat is not forbidden — it’s detectable, which is stronger.
The result is the link
A shared draw is about 200 bytes: the seed and the names, packed into the URL. There is no video to render, no result stored on a server, and nothing that can quietly change later. Whoever opens the link re-runs the identical race in their own browser and watches the same lead changes in the same order.
It also means the draw outlives us. The link is self-contained — if this site disappeared tomorrow, the seed in that URL still fully describes the race your league ran.
Why a horse race
A random number generator produces a list, and a list is impossible to care about. The point of running it as a race is the thirty seconds where your name is third and closing — the draw becomes an event the league watches together rather than a message somebody posts. The fairness would be identical if it printed a spreadsheet. Nobody would gather round for the spreadsheet.
Running it for your league
Enter every manager’s name, publish the fingerprint before you open the gate, then share the link afterwards so anyone who missed it can watch the same race. Two managers with the same name will still get their own horse, but give them something distinguishable or the result is genuinely ambiguous — that’s the one way to make this unfair, and it’s a typo rather than a flaw.
Free, no account, nothing stored. The SHA-256 is implemented in plain JavaScript rather than the browser’s crypto API so the fingerprint is identical everywhere, including on connections where that API is unavailable.