Flip 50 Coins at Once
Fifty flips in one click, with the running tally, the longest run, and the whole sequence as text you can copy. The figures below describe what a fair set of fifty actually looks like.
Flip it
Each flip is an independent 50/50 draw from your browser's random number generator. A run of five or six the same way is normal in 100 flips — that is what surprises people most.
What fifty flips usually looks like
The tally rarely lands level. A 25-25 split is the single most likely result and it still only turns up 11.2% of the time, about one set in nine. The spread around it is wide.
| Heads out of 50 | How often |
|---|---|
| Exactly 25 | 11.2% |
| 20 to 30 | 88.1% |
| 22 to 28 | 67.8% |
| 18 to 32 | 96.7% |
| Outside 18 to 32 | 3.3% |
On average heads and tails finish 5.6 apart, not level. A gap of six or more happens in 48% of sets.
A run of five is ordinary
The longest streak in fifty flips averages just under six. A run of five or more identical results appears in 82.1% of sets, and a run of six or more in 54.4%, so the long streak is more likely to be there than not. The sequence changes side about every two flips: fifty flips break into 25.5 separate runs on average.
Every sequence is equally unlikely
There are 2 to the power of 50 possible orders, which is 1,125,899,906,842,624 of them. The messy sequence you just got had a 1 in 1.1 quadrillion chance. So did fifty heads in a row. All-heads only feels rarer because it is the one pattern you would recognise.
Testing a real coin
Fifty flips cannot tell you whether a physical coin is fair. Even a perfect coin falls outside 18 to 32 heads 3.3% of the time, so one odd-looking set proves nothing. One hundred flips narrows it a little; the coin flip page covers a single toss, and ten flips is the size most classroom exercises use.