Be a Master of Craps – Pointers and Plans: The Past of Craps
Be clever, play clever, and pickup craps the right way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Crusades, but modern craps is only about one hundred years old. Current craps developed from the old English game called Hazard. No one knows for sure the birth of the game, but Hazard is said to have been discovered by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, around the 12th century. It’s supposed that Sir William’s knights gambled on Hazard during a siege on the fortification Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was acquired from the fortress’s name.
Early French colonizers brought the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 18th century, when exiled by the British, the French headed south and found refuge in the south of Louisiana where they after a while became known as Cajuns. When they were driven out of Acadia, they brought their best-loved game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it fair mathematically. It is believed that the Cajuns altered the name to craps, which is acquired from the term for the losing toss of two in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi scows and all over the nation. Many consider the dice maker John H. Winn as the father of modern craps. In 1907, Winn created the modern craps layout. He appended the Don’t Pass line so players could wager on the dice to lose. Afterwords, he developed the spaces for Place bets and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.