Pickup Craps – Hints and Tactics: The History of Craps
Be clever, play brilliant, and master craps the proper way!
Dice and dice games date all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but current craps is approximately one hundred years old. Modern craps formed from the old English game referred to as Hazard. Nobody knows for certain the origin of the game, but Hazard is believed to have been invented by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, in the twelfth century. It’s believed that Sir William’s soldiers gambled on Hazard during a siege on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was acquired from the fortification’s name.
Early French colonists imported the game Hazard to Canada. In the 18th century, when exiled by the British, the French moved south and found refuge in the south of Louisiana where they eventually became Cajuns. When they departed Acadia, they took their favored game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it fair mathematically. It’s believed that the Cajuns changed the title to craps, which was derived from the term for the non-winning toss of 2 in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game migrated to the Mississippi scows and throughout the country. A good many consider the dice maker John H. Winn as the creator of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the current craps layout. He appended the Don’t Pass line so players could wager on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he invented the spots for Place bets and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.
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