Be brilliant, play clever, and pickup craps the right way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves date back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is approximately a century old. Modern craps evolved from the 12th Century English game referred to as Hazard. No one absolutely knows the birth of the game, although Hazard is said to have been invented by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the 12th century. It’s believed that Sir William’s horsemen wagered on Hazard during a siege on the castle Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was derived from the castle’s name.
Early French colonizers brought the game Hazard to Canada. In the 1700s, when displaced by the English, the French headed south and settled in southern Louisiana where they a while later became known as Cajuns. When they fled Acadia, they took their favored game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it mathematically fair. It’s believed that the Cajuns changed the name to craps, which was gotten from the name of the non-winning throw of 2 in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi riverboats and throughout the nation. Most acknowledge the dice maker John H. Winn as the father of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the current craps setup. He added the Do not Pass line so players could wager on the dice to not win. At another time, he developed the spots for Place wagers and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.
