Coin flip: heads or tails

Flip a coin online: heads or tails

No coin in your pocket? This tool tosses one for you. The coin spins on screen for about a second and a half, lands on Heads or Tails, and the result is spelled out right below it.

A coin toss settles a decision between two people, picks which team kicks off or who takes the first turn in a board game, breaks a tie or decides a friendly bet. Teachers also use it to produce runs of flips for a probability lesson. The tool is free, needs no account, and nothing is sent anywhere: the toss happens in your browser.

How to flip the coin

1. Click "Flip the coin", or click the coin itself. On a keyboard, the space bar does the same.
2. For several flips in one go, enter a number from 1 to 100 under "Number of flips". The tool then shows the count, for example 53 × Heads, 47 × Tails.
3. Read the running tally: how many heads and tails so far, the percentage of each, and the latest 40 flips shown as small dots.
4. Click "Reset" to start a fresh series. Otherwise the tally stays on your device from one visit to the next.

What chance really does

Every flip has a one in two chance of heads, whatever came before. After five tails in a row, heads is not "due": a coin has no memory. Believing otherwise is known as the gambler's fallacy.

The chance of getting a side you called in advance n times in a row is 1/2^n:

• 4 in a row: 1 chance in 16;
• 7 in a row: 1 chance in 128;
• 10 in a row: 1 chance in 1,024.

Over 10 flips, lopsided results are normal: 7 heads and 3 tails is nothing unusual. Over 1,000 flips, the share of heads moves close to 50%. That is the law of large numbers.

An experiment to try

Set the number of flips to 100, flip, and write down how far the result is from 50. Reset and repeat ten times or so. A perfect 50–50 is rare (about 8% of series), yet the number of heads almost always stays between 40 and 60 (about 96% of series).

The "best of three" trick

Does a single toss feel too abrupt? Play best of three: the first side to come up twice wins. It takes two or three flips and the odds stay even.

Frequently asked questions

Is the toss rigged or truly random?

Each flip is drawn by the browser's cryptographic random generator. Each side gets a one in two chance, regardless of earlier flips.

Is a real coin perfectly fair?

Nearly. Tossed in the air and caught in the hand, a coin lands slightly more often on the side that was facing up at the start: about 51% of the time, according to a 2023 study of more than 350,000 tosses.

Can I flip several coins at once?

Yes. Tossing 20 coins together or one coin 20 times comes to the same thing: enter 20 under "Number of flips", up to a maximum of 100.

How do I choose between more than two options?

For three options or more, a spinning wheel or a random number draw is a better fit.