Flip a Coin: Heads or Tails

When you need to flip a coin, there is rarely one in your pocket, and a real toss can roll under the sofa or land in a hand that nobody trusts. This virtual coin gives you heads or tails in one tap, with a short 3D animation that everyone can watch, on any phone, tablet or computer.

Use it to decide who serves first, who picks the film, which of two restaurants to try, or simply to break a tie with yourself. It keeps count of every flip, can toss up to 100 coins in one go, and still works without a connection once the page has loaded on your device.

1. Choose how many coins to flip, from 1 to 100. One is the default.
2. If you like, rename the two faces, for example “Pizza” and “Sushi”.
3. Tap Flip. The coin spins for about a second and lands on heads or tails.
4. Check the running stats and history next to the coin (below it on a phone), or reset them for a fresh start.

On real coins, heads is the side with a portrait, traditionally the head of a ruler, and tails is the reverse side, whatever is shown on it. Our coin uses a neutral design that does not copy any real currency, with the faces clearly labeled Heads and Tails, so there is no argument about which side came up.

Other languages name the toss after their own coins. The French say pile ou face, where face is the heads side; Arabic speakers say malik aw kitaba, “king or writing”; in Spain it is cara o cruz, “face or cross”; and in Mexico a toss is a volado, called with águila o sol.

Set the count anywhere from 2 to 100 and every coin is tossed at the same time. A grid shows each result, with the number and percentage of heads and tails underneath. It is the fastest way to run a best of three, to give each player in a group their own toss, or to run a probability experiment in class without a bag of coins.

A fair coin does not balance itself out over a few tosses. In 10 flips, the chance of exactly 5 heads and 5 tails is only 24.6%. A streak of four or more identical results in a row happens in about 46% of series of 10 flips, and in 100 flips a run of six or more shows up about 81% of the time. None of this means the coin is broken.

Over many flips the percentages settle close to 50%: with 100 flips, the number of heads falls between 40 and 60 about 96.5% of the time. But the coin has no memory. After five tails in a row, the next flip is still exactly 50/50, even if heads feels “due”. Try it with the multi-flip grid and watch the running stats.

Sports and kick-offs

Football, cricket and many school sports start with a toss to choose ends or decide who goes first. Show the coin to both captains, let one of them call it, then use the random team generator to make the sides.

Two-way decisions

Can’t choose between two equally good options? Assign one to each face and flip. If you feel a twinge of disappointment at the result, you just learned what you really wanted. Need the question written out, or a Maybe? Try the yes or no wheel.

Probability lessons

Ask each student to predict how many heads 20 flips will give, then flip 20 coins at once and compare. Repeat a few times to show how results spread around 10.

Friendly arguments

Who does the dishes, who drives, who chooses the music: a coin settles it in a second. When more than two people are involved, the who pays wheel does the same job for a whole group.

Yes. The result is drawn with your browser’s cryptographic random generator before the animation starts, with exactly two equally likely outcomes, so the spin only shows a result that is already decided. A real hand toss is slightly less fair than people think: a large 2023 study of about 350,000 flips found that a coin lands on the side it started on roughly 51% of the time. Read how our draws are made, and test them yourself, on the fairness page.