Most speed dating events complement people at random, and participants will meet at odds "types" that they might not normally declamation to in a club. On the other hand, the random matching precludes the distinct cues, such as eye contact, that people use in bars to preselect each other before chatting them up.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard have found that "people who had had a inadvertent to interact with each other (by data processor only) on a virtual tour of a Russian Dating museum subsequently had also notable face-to-face meetings than people who had viewed only profiles."