Be clever, play smart, and pickup craps the right way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Crusades, but current craps is just about a century old. Current craps evolved from the 12th Century English game referred to as Hazard. No one absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, but Hazard is said to have been created by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, around the twelfth century. It is believed that Sir William’s horsemen gambled on Hazard amid a blockade on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was gotten from the castle’s name.
Early French colonizers brought the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 1700s, when banished by the British, the French relocated south and found refuge in southern Louisiana where they at a later time became known as Cajuns. When they left Acadia, they took their favorite game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns broke down the game and made it more mathematically fair. It’s said that the Cajuns changed the title to craps, which was derived from the name of the losing toss of 2 in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi barges and across the country. Most think the dice builder John H. Winn as the creator of current craps. In the early 1900s, Winn assembled the modern craps layout. He appended the Do not Pass line so gamblers can wager on the dice to lose. Afterwords, he designed the boxes for Place bets and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.