Heads or Tails
A coin flip you cannot drop, lose, or accuse anyone of catching funny.
What's on this wheel
- Heads
- Tails
How to use it
A real coin flip is not quite the perfect 50/50 people assume. Research from Stanford found that a flipped coin lands slightly more often on the face it started on, because of the way it wobbles in the air. It is a tiny bias, but it is real.
A digital spin has no such wobble. Both slices are exactly the same size and the draw comes from your browser's cryptographic random number generator, so it is as close to a true coin flip as you can get.
This is the standard tool for settling who goes first, who takes the bigger room, or who has to make the phone call nobody wants to make. If two options are not enough, add more lines and it becomes a general decision wheel.
Is a real coin toss actually fair?
The number is known quite precisely. In 2007 Diaconis, Holmes and Montgomery predicted from the physics that a hand-flipped coin should land on the side it started about 51% of the time, because of the wobble it picks up in the air. In 2023 a team tested it the hard way, flipping coins 350,757 times and recording the starting face each time. The answer came back at 50.8%. The prediction held.
But read what that bias is about, because almost everyone gets it wrong: it favours the side the coin started on, not heads and not tails. In the same study, people who committed to heads or tails before each toss saw no bias at all. So a physical coin toss is only unfair if you can see which face is up before you call, which at a kickoff or on a driveway is exactly the situation. Cover the coin, or call it before it is set on the thumb, and a real flip is as fair as anything on this page.
What a digital spin fixes is smaller than it sounds, then. It removes a rounding error. What it genuinely gives you is a coin nobody can palm, drop, or catch and turn over. The honest cost is that the person on the other end of a phone call cannot watch it happen. If the toss settles something that matters, both of you should be looking at the same screen. If you need a record rather than a witness, the raffle seals its result before it draws.
Common questions
- Is this fairer than flipping a real coin?
- Marginally, yes. Real coins carry a small bias towards the side they started on; a digital wheel has exactly equal slices and no physics to skew it.
- Can more than two people use it?
- For three or more, replace Heads and Tails with everyone's names, or use the random name picker instead.
- Does it work offline?
- Once the page has loaded, the spin runs entirely in your browser, so a dropped connection will not stop it.