How Nerd Competitions draws work

Last updated: 22 June 2026

Every Nerd Competitions competition is drawn by a commit-reveal method. It’s designed so you don’t have to take our word for it: because we lock the draw seed in public before entries open, the result can’t be changed in anyone’s favour after the fact.

Browse live competitions →See past winners

1. Every prize is guaranteed

The advertised prize is always drawn and awarded on the closing date, regardless of how many entries sell. We never cancel or withhold a draw because of low sales, never extend a closing date to sell more, and never substitute a percentage of the takings. The prize you see is the prize that’s won.

2. We commit before entries open

Before a single ticket is sold, we generate a secret random seed for the draw and publish its SHA-256 fingerprint (the “commitment”) on the competition page. A fingerprint can’t be reversed, and we can’t change the seed afterwards without changing the fingerprint — so the seed is locked in, in public, from the start.

3. We draw using the committed seed

When the competition closes, the winning ticket is determined from the seed we locked in at the start — combined, where available, with an independent source of randomness — and picked from the full list of valid entries. Paid and free postal entries sit in the same draw, each with an equal chance.

4. We publish the winner — and a proof you can recompute

After the draw we publish the winner on our Winners page. Every drawn competition has a public, recomputable proof page — verify it yourself. From the Winners page (or the competition page) follow “Verify this draw” to a page that publishes everything needed to check the result:

• the original draw seed and the SHA-256 commitment we published before entries opened;
• the full list of valid entries (as privacy-safe, salted tokens) and their ticket numbers;
• the exact algorithm and any independent randomness used for the draw.

That page includes a widget that recomputes the winner live in your own browser: it confirms the revealed seed matches the commitment published before entries opened, rebuilds the entries digest, and re-derives the winning ticket — so you watch the result fall out of the public values without taking our word for anything. Because the commitment was public before any entries and the seed can’t be altered without changing it, there’s no point at which the result could have been changed in anyone’s favour. That’s what “provably fair” means here. We also retain the full raw draw record and will provide it on request as a backstop — but you don’t need to ask.

Common questions

Still have questions?

If you’d like help verifying a specific draw, contact us via the Help page and we’ll walk you through it. You can also see every past winner and their recomputable proof on our Winners page.