[ English ]

Be clever, play cunning, and pickup craps the correct way!

Games that use dice and the dice themselves date back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is approximately one hundred years old. Modern craps come about from the old English game referred to as Hazard. Nobody absolutely knows the beginnings of the game, however Hazard is believed to have been discovered by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the 12th century. It is supposed that Sir William’s horsemen gambled on Hazard amid a blockade on the castle Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was derived from the citadel’s name.

Early French colonizers brought the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 1700s, when banished by the English, the French moved south and settled in southern Louisiana where they eventually became Cajuns. When they departed Acadia, they took their favored game, Hazard, with them. The Cajuns simplified the game and made it more mathematically fair. It is believed that the Cajuns altered the name to craps, which was derived from the term for the losing throw of two in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."

From Louisiana, the game migrated to the Mississippi riverboats and all over the country. A good many consider the dice builder John H. Winn as the father of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the modern craps setup. He created the Don’t Pass line so players can bet on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he created the spaces for Place bets and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.