Question of the Day - 04 December 2022

Happy to.

Casino or bank craps is a fairly recent phenomenon that dates back to the early 20th century, when dice-maker John H. Winn, widely considered the "Father of Modern Craps," changed the traditional game in a number of ways.

First, he introduced the crap bank, wherein the players, instead of betting against one another, bet against the house; Winn collected a half-percent commission on each bet placed on the games that he booked. He also invented the don't-pass line. Allowing players to bet against the shooter had the potential to double the action, as well as cut down, to a certain extent, on the chances of being cheated with loaded dice. Other dice players quickly adopted Winn's innovations and additional refinements were implemented; by 1910 or so, bank craps had overtaken faro as the most popular casino game in the U.S. It was further popularized when casino gambling was legalized in Nevada. 

For the thousand of years prior to bank craps, however, dice players were pitted against one another, a tradition that came to be known as "street craps."

The Indian Vedic hymns dating back to 2000 B.C.E. contain numerous references to the people's chief amusements, chariot racing and dice throwing. A little later, the Greek gods shot dice to divvy up the universe: Poseidon won the oceans, Hades the afterlife, and Zeus the heavens (they were Zeus' dice). In those and every dice game up until bank craps, the players won and lost one another's money and property.

The rules, customs, and challenges of player-versus-player dice games changed according to the time periods and cultures, as the dice  game of hazard, the progenitor of craps, was brought to Corsica by the Muslims, who conquered the island in the eighth century; from there, it spread quickly through Italy, then to Spain, France, and England, and gripped Europe for 1,000 years. A version of it entered the U.S. via New Orleans in the early 1800s and was transformed again by Southern slaves into a form of "private" or early street craps. That game made its way up the Mississippi River and east and west from there.

Craps was the number-one game played by GIs during World War II. Early gambling writer John Scarne estimated that $300 million changed hands over gambling games every month during the war (which seems impossible, until you remember that at its peak, eight million men and women were overseas in the Army, joined by 3.4 million in the Navy). Scarne, a writer at the time for YANK magazine, also printed two million odds charts for servicemen to stick in their helmets. A famous cartoon of that time shows five GIs around a pair of dice with the caption, "I'm learning how to shoot in the Army." 

Today, street craps is similar the world over, which means that the basic game probably hasn't changed all that much in modern times. It's easy to play, since only two items are needed: a pair of dice and a flat surface with a backstop. The players themselves oversee the action, so it's prudent to keep piles of coins or tokens separate and distribute winnings fairly to avoid accusations that might lead to violence.

Street craps starts with the players rolling the dice to determine the first shooter, according to local rules. 

The shooter is the first to bet and he (or she) can bet on or against himself; in most games, though, the shooter always bets on the pass. The rest of the players, combined, match the amount of the shooter's bet, but their money is on the "crap," or don't pass. In a word, they "fade" the shooter, meaning bet against. Whatever fraction of the shooter's total you bet, that's the fraction you'll win or lose. For example, if the shooter bets $20, four other players bet $5 each and if the shooter sevens out, the other players each get their bet back and another $5 out of the shooter's bet.

There's usually plenty of side action between players who want to bet on, well, just about anything, though the more common wagers are on the various rolls of the dice, including pass, crap, and the numbers. 

If the player rolls a seven, game over. If a point is rolled, the game proceeds just like in bank craps. Side betting can continue on each roll and those bets are settled as they're resolved, similar to side bets in bank craps. But the main pot isn't split up until the player repeats the point, in which case he wins all the other players' bets, or sevens out first, and loses his bet to his opponents.