The 1–36 range
One to thirty-six is the numbered part of a roulette wheel: eighteen red, eighteen black, arranged so that colours and high-low alternate as evenly as the layout allows.
What this draw leaves out is the zero, and the zero is the entire business model. A European wheel has 37 pockets and an American one 38, and those extra pockets are where the house edge lives, at 2.7 percent and 5.26 percent respectively.
So treat 1–36 as a fair thirty-six-way pick rather than a roulette simulator. The real wheel pays 35 to 1 on a number that comes up one time in 37.
- 1 to 36, both included
- 36 whole numbers
- 2.78%, exactly 1 in 36
- 1 to 10 numbers per draw
- None inside a multi-number draw
- Every draw gets a link that replays it
What a 1–36 draw is for
- Picking a roulette-style number for a game with nothing riding on it
- Choosing among 36 numbered lots, doors or squares
- Splitting 36 people into pairs, threes, fours, sixes or nines
- Drawing a square on a six-by-six grid
- Sampling one card from a 36-card deck
How the randomness works
Every tap calls crypto.getRandomValues, the browser's cryptographic generator, and asks it for one unsigned 32-bit value. That lands somewhere between 0 and 4,294,967,295, and it then has to be folded down to the 36 numbers in this range.
Folding it down with a plain remainder is where most generators go wrong, an error known as modulo bias. 36 does not divide 4,294,967,296 evenly: 4 values are left over at the top, and wrapping them around would make the first 4 numbers in the range fractionally likelier than the rest. This tool throws away any raw value at or above the last exact multiple of 36 and draws a fresh one instead. That is rejection sampling. It fires about 1 in 1,073,741,824 draws, and it is the difference between 2.78% exactly and 2.78% approximately.
Ask for more than one number and the tool keeps drawing until it holds that many distinct values, then sorts them ascending. Nothing is seeded, nothing is sent anywhere, and each draw is independent of the one before it. The roll history under the tool lives in your browser's local storage, where the clear button empties it. The daily lucky numbers elsewhere on this site work the opposite way on purpose: they use a seeded generator so the same date always returns the same set. How random is random sets the two side by side.
Every one of the 36 numbers lands at 2.78 percent, which is better than a real wheel manages. Physical wheels wear. In 1873 Joseph Jagger paid clerks to log the results at Monte Carlo, found a wheel leaning toward nine numbers and walked out rich, and casinos have balanced, rotated and monitored their wheels ever since. Bias hunting still works in theory and almost never in practice. And to repeat the important part: no zero here, so this is not a model of the game.
- crypto.getRandomValues, the browser's cryptographic generator
- One unsigned 32-bit value, sometimes more
- Rejection sampling onto 36 slots
- 4 of 4,294,967,296 raw values, redrawn
- No. These tools are never seeded
- Your browser. No server ever sees a draw
1–36 — frequently asked
No. A roulette wheel has a zero pocket, and American wheels have two. Those pockets are exactly where the house edge comes from, so a flat 1–36 draw is a fairer game than roulette has ever been.
One in 37 on a European wheel, one in 38 on an American one, and the payout is 35 to 1 in both cases. That gap between the true odds and the payout is the edge, and no betting pattern closes it.
It has happened, and famously. Jagger's 1873 run at Monte Carlo turned a worn wheel into a fortune, and a few teams repeated the trick in the twentieth century. Modern wheels are levelled, swapped between tables and tracked by the house, which is why the strategy is now mostly a history lesson.