Flip a Coin - Heads or Tails

Heads or tails, and nothing in between

One tap flips the coin. Heads and tails are exactly equally likely on every flip, and the running tally underneath keeps count so you can watch the split settle down over a long run.

A real coin is not quite 50/50 - this is

Physical coins are slightly biased, and more than people expect. A large 2023 study of 350,757 human coin flips found that a tossed coin lands on the same face it started on about 51% of the time, because of a wobble in the toss rather than anything to do with the coin itself. Spinning a coin on a table is worse still: the milled edge is not perfectly symmetrical, and some coins land tails far more often than heads.

A virtual flip has no physics to bias it. Each result is drawn from your browser's cryptographic random number generator, which is the same source that secures your connections, and mapped to a face with no rounding step that could favour one side.

Streaks are normal, and they mean nothing

Six heads in a row feels like the coin is broken. It is not. On a fair coin, any specific run of six flips has the same one-in-sixty-four chance as any other, and across a hundred flips a run of five or six of the same face is more likely than not to appear somewhere.

The instinct that a tails is now "due" is the gambler's fallacy, and it is the single most common misunderstanding about randomness. The coin has no memory. The next flip is 50/50 no matter what came before it, every single time.

Settling something that matters

If two people are flipping to settle a disagreement, the awkward part is not the flip - it is that one person calls it, flips it, and reports the result. Every flip here comes with a receipt: a hash shown before the flip and the seed revealed after, so the other person can check the result was not re-rolled. Here is how that works.

For anything with more than two outcomes, the wheel handles any number of options, and the number generator covers ranges.