Be smart, play clever, and pickup craps the correct way!
Dice and dice games date all the way back to the Crusades, but modern craps is approximately a century old. Current craps evolved from the ancient English game called Hazard. Nobody absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, although Hazard is said to have been made up by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the 12th century. It’s presumed that Sir William’s paladins played Hazard through a blockade on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was derived from the fortress’s name.
Early French colonists imported the game Hazard to Acadia. In the 18th century, when exiled by the British, the French moved south and settled in the south of Louisiana where they eventually became Cajuns. When they fled Acadia, they took their favored game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it fair mathematically. It is believed that the Cajuns altered the title to craps, which is gotten from the term for the non-winning throw of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, recognized as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi scows and all over the country. Many consider the dice builder John H. Winn as the father of current craps. In the early 1900s, Winn built the current craps layout. He added the Do not Pass line so gamblers can wager on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he created the spaces for Place bets and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.
