Flip a Coin

What is an online coin flip?

An online coin flip is a virtual coin toss: press a button and get heads or tails with a fair 50/50 chance. You do not need to find a coin, it never rolls under the sofa, and nobody can claim it was caught badly. The animated coin turns in the air and lands on the result, so it still feels like a real toss.

How to flip the coin

1. Press Flip or tap the coin itself.
2. The coin spins and lands on Heads (gold) or Tails (silver). The result is also written underneath.
3. The score counts heads and tails, which is handy for “best of three”.
4. Need many tosses at once? Flip 10 tosses ten coins in one go and shows how many came up heads and tails.
5. Reset score starts the count again.

Fullscreen: press Fullscreen at the top of the tool and the coin and score fill the screen, for a kick-off decision on a projector, a game night on the TV or a live stream. Press Esc to go back. With 🎨 Colors & effects you can set your own background and button colors (or a green screen for streaming) and choose whether the result is shown big with fireworks.

Is a virtual coin fairer than a real one?

Real coins are very close to fair, but not perfectly. Researchers who studied coin tossing, including a large 2023 experiment with hundreds of thousands of recorded flips, found that a tossed coin lands on the same side it started on slightly more often, about 50.8% of the time. A coin spun on a table can be even more biased, because the two faces are not exactly the same weight.

This virtual coin has none of those problems. Each flip is an independent draw from your browser's cryptographically secure random number generator, with exactly a 50% chance of heads and 50% of tails. The result is decided before the animation starts, and the animation just shows it.

When to flip a coin

• Sports and games: Decide who kicks off, who serves first, who picks sides, or who goes first in chess or a board game.
• Settling small arguments: Who chooses the restaurant, who drives, who takes out the bins. A coin flip is the classic fair way to settle a two-way choice.
• Making a stuck decision: When two options are equally good, a toss stops you going round in circles. It also shows you which side you were secretly hoping for.
• Teaching probability: Use Flip 10 again and again and watch the results. Ten flips often come out 6–4 or 7–3, not exactly 5–5. Over hundreds of flips, the share of heads gets closer and closer to half. That is the law of large numbers in action.

Common coin flip myths

• “Tails is due.” No. After five heads in a row, the next flip is still 50/50. The coin has no memory. Believing otherwise is called the gambler's fallacy.
• “Heads is luckier.” Neither side is luckier. Choose whichever you like.

For more than two options, use the spin wheel. For a plain yes or no, try the yes or no generator, and for board games, the dice roller.