How UK Comps Club draws work

Last updated: 22 June 2026

Every UK Comps Club competition is drawn by a commit-revealmethod. It’s designed so you don’t have to take our word for it: because we lock the draw seed in public beforeentries open, the result can’t be changed in anyone’s favour after the fact.

1. Funded-first

A prize is only ever drawn once the competition reaches the minimum number of entries needed to fund it. If it doesn’t reach that minimum by its closing time, the competition is cancelled and every paid entry is fully refunded — we never draw an unfunded prize.

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 (and is funded), 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 beforeentries 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.

Questions?

If you’d like help verifying a specific draw, contact us via the Helppage and we’ll walk you through it.