How It Works

← Back to the ring

The 60-second version

1. Paste your league members — one name per line, any league size from 2 to 30 (odd counts welcome).
2. Assign Wrestlers — every manager gets a randomly assigned original wrestler persona. The assignment is pure cosmetics; it never affects the outcome.
3. Start the Rumble — a full broadcast plays out: entrances with music and pyro, a two-man announce booth, finishers in slow motion, eliminations over the top rope.
4. Read the board — the first manager eliminated gets the last pick. The sole survivor gets the first overall pick. Copy the order as text, save a result card image for the group chat, or share the replay link.

Turn your sound on. The announcers are the show.

Why nobody can rig it

The entire match is computed from one random seed before the first bell. Every hit, every elimination, every "upset" comes from that seed applied identically to everyone — there is no server making decisions, and wrestler assignment never changes anyone's odds. The replay link encodes the names and the seed, so anyone in your league can re-run the identical match on their own phone and check the result.

A replay link also records which version of the match engine produced it (the v= in the link). If the match logic is ever changed, the old engine stays in the site and old links keep running on it, so a link shared today plays out the same way in five years — an update can never quietly rewrite a rumble your league already watched. Sealed links carry the same stamp, which matters most there: a reveal scheduled three weeks out is unaffected by anything that ships in between.

Weighted draws — when last place deserves a break

Off by default. Some leagues want the draft order tilted the way a real draft lottery tilts it, so the setup screen has an optional weighted draw: each manager gets ping-pong balls, and the balls decide a lottery for entry numbers. Drawing a late number is the good end of a rumble — you come in fresh against a ring full of worn-out people — so more balls is a real edge. One click on Reverse standings reads your list as last season's table and hands the balls out accordingly.

What weighting deliberately does not touch is the match. Once the bell rings every manager faces the same dice as always, and the wrestlers stay cosmetic. Putting the whole handicap in the entry number is what keeps the draw explainable — and checkable: the ball counts are written into the replay link and into a sealed commitment, so the league sees exactly what went in the drum and can re-run it.

The setup screen quotes each manager's actual odds — and a tilt meter for the drum as a whole — before you run anything, measured across 60,000 simulated matches per league size. Read them, because the effect is lopsided in a way most people don't expect: weighting buys a lot of protection from the bottom of the board and only a modest bump at the top. In a 12-team league the biggest handicap you can hand anyone is about 14% at the first overall pick, against 8.3% for an even draw — while their odds of picking last drop from 8.3% to near zero.

Sealed Reveal — for draft parties

A replay link proves the math is fair, but a suspicious league might still ask: "did the commish roll it 50 times and keep the one he liked?" The Sealed Reveal closes that door:

1. The commissioner enters the names, picks a reveal date & time (shown in your local timezone — everyone else sees it in theirs), and copies the sealed link into the league chat.
2. The link locks the names and binds the draw to one future tick of the drand randomness beacon — a public "lottery-ball machine" run jointly by Cloudflare and a league of independent organizations, firing every 3 seconds.
3. Until the scheduled moment, the number that decides your draft does not exist anywhere. The sealed page has a "Verify it's still sealed" button — the beacon's own servers answer "too early" for future ticks. Nobody can peek, and nobody can re-roll.
4. At reveal time, the button lights up on everyone's screen at once. Each phone fetches the beacon tick from multiple independent mirrors, derives the seed, and plays the identical rumble simultaneously. The results page shows the full derivation so anyone can verify it independently.

Phones, sound, and speed

Everything runs on iPhone and Android in the browser — no app, no account. Audio starts on your first tap (a browser rule, not ours). On iPhone, flip the ring/silent switch or use volume buttons if you don't hear the crowd. The broadcast defaults to 1× — use the 2×/4× buttons in the header if your league is impatient, or Skip to jump straight to the board.

Questions? See the FAQ or message u/dishee on Reddit or @rumbledraft on X.