Be clever, play smart, and discover how to play craps the ideal way!

Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but current craps is just about one hundred years old. Modern craps developed from the ancient Anglo game called Hazard. Nobody absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, but Hazard is said to have been made up by the Anglo, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the twelfth century. It is believed that Sir William’s knights gambled on Hazard during a siege on the castle Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was gotten from the citadel’s name.

Early French settlers brought the game Hazard to Nova Scotia. In the 1700s, when exiled by the English, the French moved down south and settled in southern Louisiana where they eventually became Cajuns. When they left Acadia, they took their favored game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns broke down the game and made it more mathematically fair. It is believed that the Cajuns changed the name to craps, which was derived from the name of the losing throw of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."

From Louisiana, the game migrated to the Mississippi barges and throughout the country. A few think the dice builder John H. Winn as the founder of current craps. In 1907, Winn built the current craps setup. He put in place the Do not Pass line so gamblers could bet on the dice to not win. At another time, he created the spots for Place bets and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.