How to split people into fair teams

Should teams be random or balanced?

Random teams give every person the same chance of ending up with anyone else. They are quick, impossible to accuse of favouritism, and good for mixing a group that always sits in the same cliques. The drawback is that small random teams can be lopsided by luck.

How lopsided? Split six players into two teams of three at random, and the three strongest players all land on the same team one time in ten. For a friendly game that might be fine. For a match people care about, or a class project where one group gets all the confident speakers, it is not.

Balanced teams take a little more effort: you decide who is roughly equal and then randomise within those groups. The rest of this guide covers both.

How does random dealing work?

Random dealing is exactly what a card dealer does. Shuffle the whole list, then hand out names one at a time: first to Team 1, second to Team 2, and so on, looping back to Team 1. Team sizes never differ by more than one, and every arrangement of people is equally likely.

The random team generator does this in one step. Paste the names one per line, choose either a number of teams or a number of people per team, and press Make teams. It shuffles with a cryptographic random source and deals the names round-robin, then Copy teams gives you a text version for a message or a slide.

If you would rather build suspense, put the names on the team picker wheel, tick Remove the winner after each spin, and spin one name at a time, assigning them to Team 1, Team 2, Team 3 in rotation. It takes longer, but groups enjoy watching the teams take shape.

How does a snake draft with captains work?

A snake draft is the traditional way to let captains choose while keeping things even. Captains take turns picking, but the order reverses every round: with three captains it runs A, B, C, then C, B, A, then A, B, C again. The captain who picks last in one round picks first in the next, which offsets the advantage of the first pick.

Use a wheel for the one decision that everyone argues about: who picks first. The who goes first wheel, or the random order generator for a full order of captains, settles it in seconds.

Snake drafts work well among adults who know each other's abilities, such as a five-a-side league or a quiz night. They are a poor fit for children, for reasons covered below.

How do skill tiers keep teams balanced and random?

Skill tiers combine the fairness of chance with the balance of a draft, without anyone publicly choosing anyone. The method:

1. Decide how many teams you need, say four.
2. Privately sort people into tiers of four, from most to least experienced for this activity. With 16 people, that makes four tiers.
3. Spin or shuffle within the top tier and deal one person to each team.
4. Repeat for each tier. For extra balance, reverse the dealing order each tier, snake-style, so the team that got the first pick in one tier gets the last in the next.

Every team ends up with one person from each tier, and within tiers it is pure chance. You can do this with one wheel by pasting in each tier with Edit as text in turn, or run the team generator once per tier and combine the results.

Keep the tiers to yourself. Their purpose is balance, not ranking, and a teacher saying "you are in the bottom tier" out loud defeats the point. Base tiers on the skill the activity needs, not on popularity or general impressions.

How do you avoid the picked-last problem?

Many adults remember standing against the gym wall while captains chose their friends and the most athletic classmates. SHAPE America, the US professional body for physical education, lists student captains picking teams as an inappropriate practice in its instructional guidelines, because popular or highly skilled students are chosen first and cliques become obvious. It recommends forming groups in ways that preserve every student's dignity, such as randomly, by skill when the lesson needs it, or by a neutral system such as birthdays or colours.

A few habits help, in PE and anywhere else:

• Reveal teams all at once. A list on a screen or a slide feels very different from names called one by one.
• Use neutral team names such as colours or numbers, not the captain's name.
• Let the process be visible. When students see a wheel or generator make the teams, they blame chance rather than each other.
• Reshuffle regularly. New teams every lesson or every unit stop groups hardening.
• If you use captains, have them draft privately with you beforehand, then post the finished teams.

For choosing who answers questions in class, as opposed to who plays together, the name picker for teachers removes each student once they have had a turn.

What if the numbers do not divide evenly?

With 23 people and four teams, round-robin dealing gives three teams of six and one of five, which is the most even split possible. Decide in advance how the smaller team is compensated: in sport, a rolling substitute or a player who switches sides at half time; in a class project, a slightly smaller brief.

If you care about team size more than the number of teams, the team generator's "People per team" option fixes the size and works out how many teams are needed. Pairs are simply teams of two.

How do you make fair teams for remote meetings and breakout rooms?

Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams can assign people to breakout rooms automatically, spreading participants evenly without you choosing who goes where. That is the quickest option for a mixer or a discussion round.

When you need more control, such as balancing time zones, departments or experience, make the teams first with the team generator, copy them, and assign rooms manually or paste the list into the chat so people can find their room. Some platforms let you pre-assign rooms when you schedule the meeting, which saves time on the call. Rotate groups between rounds so the same people are not always together.

Which team method should you use?