Be a Master of Craps – Pointers and Schemes: The History of Craps
Be brilliant, play smart, and pickup craps the proper way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is only about a century old. Current craps evolved from the old Anglo game referred to as Hazard. Nobody absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, although Hazard is said to have been invented by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, in the twelfth century. It’s presumed that Sir William’s horsemen gambled on Hazard through a siege on the citadel Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was acquired from the castle’s name.
Early French colonists brought the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 18th century, when exiled by the English, the French moved south and settled in the south of Louisiana where they eventually became known as Cajuns. When they left Acadia, they took their best-loved game, Hazard, with them. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it more mathematically fair. It’s said that the Cajuns adjusted the title to craps, which is acquired from the name of the bad luck toss of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game extended 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 developed the modern craps setup. He added the Do not Pass line so players could bet on the dice to lose. At another time, he designed the boxes for Place bets and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.
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