Master Craps – Pointers and Tactics: The Past of Craps
Be clever, play brilliant, and master craps the correct way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves date back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is approximately a century old. Current craps developed from the ancient Anglo game referred to as Hazard. No one absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, however Hazard is believed to have been made up by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the twelfth century. It is theorized that Sir William’s horsemen enjoyed Hazard through a siege on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was acquired from the castle’s name.
Early French colonists brought the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 18th century, when driven away by the British, the French relocated south and located sanctuary in southern Louisiana where they eventually became known as Cajuns. When they fled Acadia, they took their preferred game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns simplified the game and made it mathematically fair. It’s said that the Cajuns changed the title to craps, which is acquired from the term for the non-winning toss of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, recognized as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi riverboats and across the nation. A good many acknowledge the dice builder John H. Winn as the father of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the modern craps setup. He added the Do not Pass line so gamblers could bet on the dice to lose. Afterwords, he invented the spaces for Place bets and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.