A short history of craps: from hazard to Las Vegas

The game on the felt today is the result of a few centuries of simplification, one clever fix to a broken house edge, and a lot of soldiers with nothing to do. Here is how it happened, with the parts nobody can pin down marked as such.

Hazard, the ancestor

Craps descends from an English dice game called hazard. Tradition places its origins in the Middle Ages; a dice game by that name is mentioned in Chaucer, and detailed rules survive from the 1600s and 1700s, when it was a fixture of London gaming clubs. The medieval origin stories, which tie it to the Crusades and a castle siege, have no solid documentation behind them, so treat them as folklore.

What's certain is that hazard was complicated. The caster (the shooter) first threw to establish a main, a number from 5 to 9, and then threw for a chance. Whether a throw won or lost depended on the combination of main and chance, with different rules for each pairing, and the numbers 2, 3, 11, and 12 changed meaning depending on the main. Players wagered against each other, not against a house. The name is the important inheritance: throwing a 2 or 3 in hazard was called crabs, and that word, filtered through French and American mouths, is the likeliest source of the modern name.

The French connection and the name

French players took up hazard in the 1700s and, by most accounts, simplified it. The two-die total of 7 became the fixed main, which removed the tangle of pairings and left something much closer to the game we know: throw for a number, then try to repeat it before a 7.

The name is where traditions diverge. One version says “craps” comes directly from “crabs,” the English term for the losing throw. Another says it comes from the French crapaud, meaning toad, supposedly because street players squatted like toads over the dice. A third points to the French spelling “crabes.” Nobody has settled it. What is clear is that the term for a losing 2, 3, or 12 on the comeout, still called craps today, existed before the game did, and the game ended up named after its worst roll.

New Orleans and the Mississippi

The game reached America through French Louisiana. The figure usually credited is Bernard de Marigny, a wealthy New Orleans landowner of French descent who is said to have brought the French version back from Europe in the early 1800s and popularised it locally. He is a documented historical person, and the association is repeated in most histories of the game, though the details of exactly when and how are thinner than the retellings suggest.

From New Orleans the game moved up the Mississippi with the riverboats, and through the 1800s it spread as a street and back-room game across the South and the growing cities. It was cheap (two dice, any flat surface), fast, and social. It was also, in this era, mostly played between players rather than against a bank. That distinction turned out to be the whole problem.

The broken edge and John H. Winn

Early American craps allowed players to bet with the shooter or against, and whoever ran the game (or the players between themselves) set the payouts. Anyone offering the “against” side could shade the odds in their favour, and with crooked dice in circulation, a hustler could win from either side. A game with no fair, fixed structure is a game that respectable operators won't run.

The fix is generally credited to a dice maker named John H. Winn, working in the early 1900s (dates in the retellings range from about 1907 to the 1910s, and the primary sources are thin). His contribution was to lay out a game where the house took both sides at fixed prices. Players could bet the shooter would pass, or bet the shooter would not, and the house paid even money on either, taking its edge not from shaded payouts but from a small structural asymmetry. The don't pass bet was the innovation, and the key detail was bar 12: on the comeout, a 12 pushed the don't pass instead of winning it. That one pushed number gives the house 1.36% on the don't side, almost exactly matching the 1.41% on the pass side. The house no longer needed loaded dice or a crooked payout to win. It had a printed layout with a known edge on both sides.

This form is called bank craps, because the house banks every bet. Every casino craps table in the world today is a bank craps table, and the pass and don't pass lines still sit next to each other for exactly the reason Winn put them there. The mechanics of each are in the pass line, explained completely and playing the don't side.

Street craps and two world wars

Even with bank craps established, the simpler player-versus-player version never went away. Street craps needs only two dice and a wall to throw against, and it went everywhere American soldiers went. By most accounts the game was common in the ranks in the First World War and close to universal in the Second: barracks, troopships, and foxholes were full of it. When millions of veterans came home, they brought a working knowledge of pass, don't pass, and shooting against a wall with them.

That timing mattered. The generation that knew craps from military service was the same generation that had money to spend in the postwar years, and it made craps the most popular table game in American casinos through the 1950s and into the 1960s. It has since been overtaken by blackjack and by machines, but the crowded, noisy craps pit of the mid-century casino was largely built by returning soldiers.

Las Vegas and the modern layout

Nevada legalised casino gambling in 1931, and the Las Vegas resort boom of the late 1940s and 1950s gave bank craps its permanent home. The layout standardised there: pass line and don't pass, come and don't come, six point boxes, the field, and a center section of proposition bets managed by a stickman. Free odds behind the line, the one zero-edge bet in the casino, were offered as a way to draw players; casinos gradually raised the allowed multiple from single odds to double and beyond as they competed.

The 3-4-5x odds structure, which lets you take 3x behind a 4 or 10, 4x behind a 5 or 9, and 5x behind a 6 or 8, became the common Las Vegas standard because it makes every full-odds win the same: $10 on the line with maximum odds wins $60 no matter the point, which keeps the dealer's arithmetic simple. It's the structure PointPuck uses, and the reasoning is in free odds explained.

Other features arrived over time. The bar 12 rule became universal (a few casinos bar the 2 instead, which is mathematically identical). Buy and lay bets, with their 5% commission, appeared to let players get true odds on the outside numbers. The Big 6 and Big 8 boxes, which pay worse than placing the same numbers, spread and are now slowly disappearing. Bonus side bets like All Small, All Tall, and All or Nothing at All are a 21st-century addition. And the bets in the center, the hardways and one-roll props, have stayed on the layout for a century largely because they're profitable for the house; a survey of their prices is in house edge on every bet.

What changed and what didn't

The remarkable thing about that table is the direction. Craps is one of the few casino games whose main bet got cheaper for the player over time. The dice never changed: 36 combinations, six ways to make a 7, and payouts that are just prices on those probabilities, as explained in dice probability.

Craps online and in simulation

The latest chapter is digital. Casino-style craps moved online in the late 1990s and 2000s, first as software with random number generators standing in for dice, later with live-dealer video tables. Free simulators followed, and they've become the practical way to learn: a live table moves too fast for a beginner, and every mistake costs real money.

A good simulator keeps the Las Vegas rules exactly, including the parts that don't flatter the house, like full 3-4-5x odds, and it should be transparent about its dice. PointPuck runs a live multiplayer version where the shooter knocks to send the dice, and publishes a dice audit showing that every roll matches the 36-combination distribution. Hazard's players would have recognised none of the hardware and all of the game: throw for a number, hope it repeats before a 7.