Call the toss

The call comes first, which is the whole ritual

A coin flip answers a question. A called toss settles an argument, because one side commits out loud before anything moves and the other side gets whatever is left. That order is enforced here: the coin will not flip until a side has been called, and the call cannot be changed once it is in.

If you only want a result and nobody is calling anything, the coin flip is the shorter version of this page and the one to use.

Who kicks off, and who goes first

Every sport that starts with a toss does the same two things: one captain calls while the coin is in the air, and the winner chooses rather than simply receives. This page handles the first half. The second half is a conversation, and it should be.

The call alternates by default so the same side is not always the one guessing, which matters over a best of five and matters more in a classroom, where being the one who never calls is noticed.

Best of three, and why a run of heads proves nothing

A single toss is one in two. A best of three is not three tosses, it is as many as it takes for one side to reach two, and the match stops the moment that happens. Playing on after it is settled feels fairer and is not: the extra toss cannot change the winner, so all it does is give the losing side something to point at.

Long runs of the same side are ordinary. In five tosses, three in a row turns up about a third of the time, and a coin that has landed heads four times has exactly the same chance of heads on the fifth as it did on the first. Nothing here carries memory from one toss to the next, which is the honest version of a coin and the boring one.

Names on the sides, kept on the device

The two sides take whatever you call them, a person, a team, a class group or a pair of colours, and the names stay in this browser. They are not in the page address, so a link you send somebody carries the format and nothing else, and there is no account holding them either.

If more than two things are in the running, a coin is the wrong shape of answer and the wheel or the hat handles any number of names. A toss is for exactly two, called out loud, in front of everybody.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.toss.match, pph.toss.caller, pph.toss.sides and pph.toss.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.