Master Craps – Tricks and Schemes: The Background of Craps
Be cunning, play cunning, and master craps the ideal way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves date all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is only about 100 years old. Current craps formed from the old English game referred to as Hazard. Nobody absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, although Hazard is said to have been invented by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, around the 12th century. It’s theorized that Sir William’s soldiers bet on Hazard through a siege on the citadel Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was derived from the citadel’s name.
Early French colonists imported the game Hazard to Acadia. In the 1700s, when exiled by the English, the French headed down south and settled in southern Louisiana where they eventually became known as Cajuns. When they fled Acadia, they took their favorite game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns broke down the game and made it more mathematically fair. It is believed that the Cajuns adjusted the title to craps, which is derived from the name of the losing toss of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi barges and throughout the nation. Most consider the dice builder John H. Winn as the creator of current craps. In 1907, Winn created the current craps layout. He added the Do not Pass line so gamblers could wager on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he developed the spots for Place wagers and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.