Master Craps – Pointers and Tactics: The History of Craps
Be cunning, play clever, and pickup craps the ideal way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves date back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but current craps is approximately a century old. Modern craps come about from the old Anglo game referred to as Hazard. Nobody knows for sure the birth of the game, although Hazard is believed to have been made up by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, around the twelfth century. It is presumed that Sir William’s paladins played Hazard during a siege on the fortification Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was derived from the citadel’s name.
Early French colonists brought the game Hazard to Canada. In the 1700s, when exiled by the English, the French moved south and settled in southern Louisiana where they eventually became known as Cajuns. When they departed Acadia, they took their best-loved game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it fair mathematically. It’s said that the Cajuns changed the name to craps, which is derived from the term for the non-winning throw of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, recognized as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi riverboats and all over the nation. Many consider the dice builder John H. Winn as the creator of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the current craps setup. He appended the Don’t Pass line so players could bet on the dice to not win. At another time, he developed the spaces for Place wagers and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.