Craps Information

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Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is approximately a century old. Modern craps developed from the ancient English game referred to as Hazard. Nobody knows for sure the ancestry of the game, although Hazard is believed to have been invented by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the 12th century. It is supposed that Sir William’s knights enjoyed Hazard during a blockade on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was gotten from the fortification’s name.

Early French colonizers imported the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 18th century, when displaced by the British, the French headed south and found safety in the south of Louisiana where they eventually became Cajuns. When they were driven out of Acadia, they took their best-loved game, Hazard, with them. The Cajuns simplified the game and made it more mathematically fair. It is believed that the Cajuns changed the title to craps, which is derived from the term for the losing toss of two in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."

From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi scows and all over the nation. Many think the dice maker John H. Winn as the father of current craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the current craps layout. He put in place the Do not Pass line so players could wager on the dice to lose. Afterwords, he designed the boxes for Place bets and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.