Be smart, play clever, and discover how to play craps the right way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves date all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is approximately one hundred years old. Modern craps formed from the old English game referred to as Hazard. No one absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, but Hazard is believed to have been invented by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, in the 12th century. It is presumed that Sir William’s knights enjoyed Hazard through a blockade on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was acquired from the fortress’s name.
Early French colonists imported the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 18th century, when driven away by the English, the French headed south and located safety in the south of Louisiana where they at a later time became Cajuns. When they left Acadia, they took their preferred game, Hazard, with them. The Cajuns modernized the game and made it more mathematically fair. It’s said that the Cajuns adjusted the title to craps, which was derived from the term for the losing toss of 2 in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game migrated to the Mississippi riverboats and across the nation. Most consider the dice maker John H. Winn as the founder of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn assembled the current craps setup. He added the Do not Pass line so gamblers could wager on the dice to not win. At another time, he designed the boxes for Place wagers and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.
