05.19
Learn to Play Craps – Hints and Strategies: The Background of Craps
Be brilliant, play smart, and master craps the correct way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but current craps is approximately 100 years old. Current craps evolved from the old Anglo game called Hazard. No one absolutely knows the birth of the game, although Hazard is believed to have been created by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the 12th century. It is presumed that Sir William’s paladins enjoyed Hazard amid a blockade on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was acquired from the castle’s name.
Early French colonists imported the game Hazard to Acadia. In the 18th century, when driven away by the English, the French moved south and settled in southern Louisiana where they after a while became Cajuns. When they were driven out of Acadia, they took their favored game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns broke down the game and made it fair mathematically. It is said that the Cajuns changed the name to craps, which was derived from the term for the non-winning throw of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi riverboats and all over the country. A few think the dice maker John H. Winn as the father of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn assembled the modern craps setup. He added the Don’t Pass line so gamblers could wager on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he designed the spaces for Place bets and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.