Be brilliant, play cunning, and become versed in craps the right way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves date back to the Crusades, but current craps is approximately a century old. Current craps formed from the ancient English game referred to as Hazard. Nobody absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, but Hazard is said to have been created by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, around the 12th century. It’s believed that Sir William’s knights played Hazard amid a siege on the castle Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was derived from the citadel’s name.
Early French settlers brought the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 18th century, when banished by the English, the French moved down south and found safety in southern Louisiana where they after a while became known as Cajuns. When they fled Acadia, they took their preferred game, Hazard, with them. The Cajuns simplified the game and made it fair mathematically. It’s believed that the Cajuns changed the name to craps, which is derived from the name of the losing toss of 2 in the game of Hazard, recognized as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi barges and throughout the country. Many consider the dice maker John H. Winn as the creator of current craps. In 1907, Winn designed the current craps setup. He appended the Do not Pass line so gamblers could wager on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he established the spaces for Place bets and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.
