Craps Tips

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Dice and dice games date all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but current craps is only about 100 years old. Modern craps formed from the ancient English game called Hazard. No one knows for sure the ancestry of the game, although Hazard is believed to have been made up by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the 12th century. It is supposed that Sir William’s paladins gambled on Hazard amid a blockade on the fortification Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was acquired from the castle’s name.

Early French settlers imported the game Hazard to Canada. In the 18th century, when driven away by the British, the French moved down south and found safety in southern Louisiana where they after a while became Cajuns. When they fled Acadia, they brought their preferred game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns modernized the game and made it fair mathematically. It’s said that the Cajuns altered the name to craps, which was derived from the term for the losing toss of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."

From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi riverboats and throughout the nation. Many think the dice builder John H. Winn as the creator of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the modern craps setup. He created the Don’t Pass line so gamblers could wager on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he developed the boxes for Place bets and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.