Pickup Craps – Tricks and Techniques: The Past of Craps
Be cunning, play clever, and learn how to play craps the right way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Crusades, but current craps is approximately a century old. Modern craps come about from the ancient Anglo game called Hazard. No one knows for certain the ancestry of the game, but Hazard is said to have been invented by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, around the twelfth century. It’s supposed that Sir William’s paladins played Hazard amid a blockade on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was gotten from the fortification’s name.
Early French colonizers imported the game Hazard to Canada. In the 1700s, when driven away by the British, the French relocated down south and settled in the south of Louisiana where they at a later time became Cajuns. When they were driven out of Acadia, they brought their favored game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it more mathematically fair. It’s believed that the Cajuns changed the title to craps, which was acquired from the term for the non-winning throw of two in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi riverboats and throughout the country. Most consider the dice maker John H. Winn as the father of current craps. In 1907, Winn developed the modern craps setup. He created the Don’t Pass line so players could wager on the dice to lose. Afterwords, he invented the boxes for Place wagers and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.