Thursday, 25 September 2008 01:35

The game we know as Craps was originally played in France in the 1700s. It was a game called Hazard which had the nickname “crabs” and the name Craps developed from a mispronunciation of this. Hazard migrated from the European aristocracy to the French Louisiana colony of Arcadia where it was played extensively.

In 1813, New Orleans gambler Bernard de Mandelville simplified the game of Hazard and transformed it into its first incarnation of the modern form of Craps. Mandeville’s new game of Craps travelled the Mississippi on steamboats and spread throughout the rest of the United States. It had one major flaw in that it was vulnerable to being cheated with fixed dice thanks to its rules of betting.

This problem was fixed by John H. Winn who introduced the right and wrong bets on the Craps table layout for players. These are the Don’t Come and Don’t Pass bets we are all familiar with nowadays and meant that a player could bet either with or against the shooter, eliminating any advantage in using fixed dice.

The popularity of the game grew over the years and during the Second World War, soldiers used Craps as entertainment and as a way to break up the doldrums of war.

By the 1990s, craps had fallen in popularity due to the insurgence of a myriad of slots games in casinos, although that popularity was regained as technological advances were made in the late 1990s with online casinos where Craps has made a remarkable revival.