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Be clever, play smart, and pickup craps the ideal way!

Games that use dice and the dice themselves date all the way back to the Crusades, but current craps is approximately 100 years old. Modern craps developed from the old Anglo game called Hazard. Nobody knows for certain the ancestry of the game, although Hazard is believed to have been created by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, around the 12th century. It’s theorized that Sir William’s paladins enjoyed Hazard through a blockade on the citadel Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was acquired from the fortress’s name.

Early French settlers brought the game Hazard to Acadia. In the 1700s, when driven away by the British, the French headed south and found refuge in southern Louisiana where they at a later time became Cajuns. When they were driven out of Acadia, they took their favorite game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns modernized the game and made it more mathematically fair. It’s believed that the Cajuns altered the name to craps, which is derived from the term for the non-winning throw of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."

From Louisiana, the game extended to the Mississippi scows and throughout the nation. Many think the dice maker John H. Winn as the creator of current craps. In the early 1900s, Winn built the modern craps setup. He put in place the Do not Pass line so gamblers can bet on the dice to not win. Afterwards, he established the spaces for Place wagers and added the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.