Be clever, play brilliant, and pickup craps the proper way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is approximately 100 years old. Current craps come about from the old English game referred to as Hazard. No one knows for sure the ancestry of the game, however Hazard is said to have been invented by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the 12th century. It’s believed that Sir William’s horsemen enjoyed Hazard during a siege on the fortress Hazarth in 1125 AD. The name Hazard was derived from the citadel’s name.
Early French settlers imported the game Hazard to Acadia. In the 1700s, when exiled by the English, the French headed south and located sanctuary in the south of Louisiana where they eventually became Cajuns. When they departed Acadia, they took their preferred game, Hazard, along. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it fair mathematically. It is said that the Cajuns changed the title to craps, which is derived from the term for the non-winning throw of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, known as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi scows and throughout the nation. Many consider the dice maker John H. Winn as the father of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn assembled the current craps layout. He appended the Do not Pass line so players can wager on the dice to not win. Afterwords, he designed the boxes for Place wagers and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.