Learn to Play Craps – Pointers and Plans: The Past of Craps
Be smart, play smart, 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 one hundred years old. Modern craps developed from the old English game referred to as Hazard. Nobody knows for sure the beginnings of the game, but Hazard is said to have been discovered by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, in the twelfth century. It’s presumed that Sir William’s soldiers wagered on Hazard during a siege on the castle Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was derived from the fortification’s name.
Early French settlers brought the game Hazard to Canada. In the 1700s, when banished by the English, the French moved down south and located safety in southern Louisiana where they after a while became known as Cajuns. When they fled Acadia, they took their preferred game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns broke down the game and made it more mathematically fair. It is believed that the Cajuns adjusted the name to craps, which was derived from the term for the non-winning toss of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game migrated to the Mississippi barges and throughout the country. Many consider the dice builder John H. Winn as the creator of modern craps. In 1907, Winn designed the current craps setup. He appended the Don’t Pass line so gamblers could wager on the dice to lose. Afterwords, he developed the spaces for Place wagers and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.