Be brilliant, play smart, and discover how to play craps the proper way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves date all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is only about a century old. Current craps evolved from the old Anglo game called Hazard. Nobody knows for sure the ancestry of the game, although Hazard is believed to have been made up by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, in the 12th century. It is theorized that Sir William’s soldiers gambled on Hazard through a siege on the castle Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was gotten from the fortress’s name.
Early French colonists imported the game Hazard to Canada. In the 18th century, when displaced by the English, the French moved down south and found safety in the south of Louisiana where they a while later became Cajuns. When they left Acadia, they took their best-loved game, Hazard, with them. The Cajuns simplified the game and made it fair mathematically. It is said that the Cajuns altered the name to craps, which is derived from the term for the losing toss of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi riverboats and all over the nation. Many think the dice maker John H. Winn as the founder of modern craps. In 1907, Winn developed the current craps setup. He put in place the Do not Pass line so gamblers could bet on the dice to not win. At another time, he invented the boxes for Place bets and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.
