Random Team Generator (Balanced by Skill)

About the Random Team Generator (Balanced by Skill)

Paste a list of names, choose how many teams (or how many people per team), and get teams in a second. Random gives every possible split the same chance; Balanced by skill uses ratings you add after each name (Asha, 8) to make teams whose average skill is as close as possible — ideal for five-a-side, cricket, quiz nights, hackathons and classroom groups.

You can also keep friends together, keep rivals apart, spread a group such as gender, role or class section evenly across the teams, and choose captains (the ones you mark, one picked at random, or the best player in each team). Teams can be copied, downloaded as CSV or printed. Everything happens in your browser.

Common uses

• Sports: football, cricket, basketball and badminton doubles with fair sides.
• Teachers: project groups, reading groups and seating, with pupils who should not sit together kept apart.
• Offices and events: hackathon teams, workshop tables, quiz teams and team-building games.
• Game nights: random teams for charades, Pictionary or any team game.

How the balancing works

Ratings are put on a common scale (how far each one is from the group’s average). People are then dealt one at a time, strongest first, each to the team that needs them most — the team with the fewest people, and among those the one furthest below its fair share of skill. After that the tool keeps moving and swapping single people between teams for as long as any move makes the teams more even, shakes the result up with random swaps to escape dead ends, and repeats the whole process from several random starting points, keeping the most even result.

“More even” is judged in a fixed order: first team sizes (never more than one apart unless keep-together groups force it), then each group label, then skill. With balanced sizes, equal average skill is the goal, so a team with one extra player is not treated as weaker. Checked against every possible split of eight people into two teams (150 random cases), it found the best split every time; for long lists the result is very close to the best possible.

Random teams are really random

With no rules, the list is shuffled with the Fisher–Yates method using your browser’s cryptographically secure random generator (crypto.getRandomValues), then dealt out in turn, so every split is equally likely and sizes differ by at most one. With keep-together, keep-apart or group rules, people are placed in a random order into the teams that still have room and respect the rules.

Writing the list

• Asha — just a name
• Asha, 8 — a rating (any scale: 1–5, 1–10, 0–100, decimals allowed)
• Asha, 8, F or Asha, F — a group label (gender, role, class section …)
• *Asha or Asha (c) — a captain, used with Captains: the ones marked with *

Commas, semicolons, tabs (from a spreadsheet) and | all separate the parts. Names must be unique — add an initial for two people with the same name. People without a rating count as the average in balanced mode.

Limitations

• Up to 1,000 people and 100 teams.
• Ratings are only as fair as the numbers you give: the tool balances the ratings, not the players.
• Group labels are matched exactly but ignoring case: “F” and “f” are the same group, “F” and “Female” are not.
• Results are not saved; copy, download or print the teams you want to keep. Your list and settings are remembered in this browser.

Privacy

Names, ratings and rules never leave your browser. They are remembered on this device so the list is still there next time; press Clear to remove it.