Team Balancer
List your players with a rough skill rating and get two evenly matched teams for cornhole doubles, bocce, or any backyard game-day tournament.
Balanced teams
Team A
- Alice (10)
- Dave (7)
- Eve (6)
Team B
- Bob (9)
- Carol (8)
- Frank (5)
Why a snake draft beats picking teams by hand
Picking teams by eye tends to cluster friends together or stack all the strongest players on one side. A snake draft fixes this by working strictly from the rankings: the strongest player anchors one team, the next two strongest split across both teams, and so on, alternating direction each pass so no single team can accumulate an unfair share of the top talent.
It’s a deterministic, repeatable process — the same player list and ratings will always produce the same two teams, which is useful when a group wants to settle team assignments quickly and move on to actually playing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a snake draft?
It's the standard way real captains and fantasy leagues split a ranked pool of players fairly: rank everyone by skill, then deal them onto two teams in a serpentine order — first pick to Team A, next two to Team B, next two to Team A, and so on. It guarantees the team sizes never differ by more than one player and tends to produce close overall totals without any guesswork.
What should I use as the 'rating'?
Anything consistent works — a 1-10 self-rated skill level, an average score from past games, or even just an experience ranking (most experienced to least). The balancer only needs the numbers to rank players relative to each other, not an official scale.
Will the two teams always be perfectly equal?
Not exactly equal, but close — a snake draft is a well-established heuristic, not a guaranteed-optimal split. It reliably keeps both the team sizes and the total ratings close together, which is what actually matters for a fun, competitive game.
What happens with an odd number of players?
One team gets one extra player. The snake pattern still alternates fairly, so the extra player lands wherever the draft order naturally puts them rather than always stacking the same team.
A quick, fair starting point for casual play — feel free to swap a player or two afterward if your group knows something the ratings don't capture.