Be brilliant, play cunning, and pickup craps the correct way!
Games that use dice and the dice themselves goes all the way back to the Middle Eastern Crusades, but modern craps is only about one hundred years old. Modern craps formed from the old English game called Hazard. No one absolutely knows the ancestry of the game, however Hazard is said to have been created by the Englishman, Sir William of Tyre, sometime in the twelfth century. It is theorized that Sir William’s horsemen bet on Hazard during a siege on the fortification Hazarth in 1125 AD. The title Hazard was acquired from the fortress’s name.
Early French colonizers imported the game Hazard to Canada. In the 18th century, when banished by the British, the French relocated down south and settled in the south of Louisiana where they at a later time became known as Cajuns. When they were driven out of Acadia, they took their favorite game, Hazard, with them. The Cajuns streamlined the game and made it more mathematically fair. It’s believed that the Cajuns changed the title to craps, which was acquired from the name of the losing toss of snake-eyes in the game of Hazard, referred to as "crabs."
From Louisiana, the game moved to the Mississippi riverboats and throughout the country. A few think the dice maker John H. Winn as the creator of modern craps. In the early 1900s, Winn developed the modern craps layout. He created the Do not Pass line so gamblers can wager on the dice to not win. Later, he invented the boxes for Place bets and put in place the Big 6, Big 8, and Hardways.