Play Hazard Online

What Is Hazard?

Hazard is the English dice game from which Craps descends. A single player, the caster, calls a number from 5 to 9, the main, and throws two dice. Some first throws win at once (a nick), some lose at once (an out), and the rest set a chance, a number the caster must throw again before the main comes back. Every element of modern craps is here: a come-out roll, a point to repeat, a killer number that ends the hand. What makes Hazard different, and harder, is that the caster picks the main, and the winning and losing numbers on the first throw change depending on which main was chosen.

For roughly five hundred years this was the dice game of England, played by soldiers, apprentices and dukes alike, and for a century it was the game that made and broke fortunes in the gaming clubs of St James’s. Then it crossed the Atlantic, lost its choice of main, gained a printed layout and became craps. Playing Hazard today is a way to see the bones of the modern game, and to appreciate why the Americans stopped choosing a main: the numbers say 7 was always the right answer.

A Short History of Hazard

The name comes through Old French hasard and Spanish azar, and ultimately, most etymologists agree, from Arabic, either az-zahr (“the die”) or yasara (“he played at dice”). The romantic origin story, repeated in countless books, holds that William of Tyre invented the game to pass the time while besieging a castle called Hazarth or Asart in 1125. It should be treated as a legend. The William of Tyre whose name has attached to it was an archbishop and chronicler born around 1130, five years after the supposed siege, and no contemporary source connects him to dice. What the record does show is a cluster of Anglo-Norman references from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries to a game called hasard or hazart, which fits a game picked up by Crusaders from their Arabic-speaking opponents and brought home.

By Chaucer’s time it was ordinary enough to need no explanation. In The Pardoner’s Tale (late 1380s or 1390s) the three rioters are “pleyinge atte hasard,” and the Pardoner’s sermon against gambling lists “hasardrye” among the deadly vices of the tavern. Hazard appears in statutes forbidding servants and apprentices to play it and in Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester of 1674, which called it “the most bewitching Game that is plaid on the Dice” and warned that it would empty any purse. Edmond Hoyle wrote up the odds in 1790, by which time the game had already taken the form described on this page.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were Hazard’s golden age. It was the main game at White’s, Brooks’s and Almack’s, the great London clubs, and Charles James Fox, the Whig statesman, ran up gambling debts at faro and hazard so large that his father settled well over 100,000 pounds of them in the 1770s. In 1828 William Crockford, the son of an East End fishmonger who had made a fortune running hazard banks, opened Crockford’s Club at 50 St James’s Street with the Duke of Wellington among its founding members. The club was built around a hazard table, and in the decade before Crockford retired in 1840 it was said to have relieved the English aristocracy of more than a million pounds. Its success, and the ruin it caused, helped bring on the Gaming Act of 1845, which made gambling debts unenforceable and killed the club game in England.

Hazard’s American life had already begun. Around 1805 Bernard de Marigny, a young Louisiana planter educated in London, brought the game to New Orleans. Somewhere in the city’s gambling houses the main was fixed at 7, the roles were reshuffled so that the casting side became the Pass bet, and the old slang word for a losing throw of 2 or 3, crabs, became the name of the whole game: craps. The choice of 7 was no accident; as the odds section below shows, 7 was always the best main, so fixing it there cost the caster nothing and made the game far quicker to learn.

Hazard Rules

Equipment

• Two six-sided dice.
• Chips to stake, and traditionally a box or cup to throw from.
• In a live game, a second player or the house acts as the setter, covering the caster’s stake.

Object

To win the stake by throwing a nick on the first throw, or by throwing the chance again before the main once a chance is set.

How a Round Works

1. Call the main. The caster names 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. In our game this is a row of chip buttons.
2. Stake. The caster puts up a stake, which the setter covers.
3. First throw (the come-out). Throw two dice and add them. - The main: a nick. The caster wins at once. - 2 or 3: an out (also “throwing out” or “crabs”). The caster loses at once. - 11 or 12: it depends on the main, as shown in the table below. - Anything else (4 to 10, other than the main): that total is the chance.
4. The chance phase. The caster keeps throwing. - The chance comes up: the caster wins. - The main comes up: the caster loses. - Anything else: throw again.
5. Settle the stake, then call a new main for the next round.

The Come-out Table

This is the part of Hazard that trips people up. The same 11 or 12 can be a win, a loss or nothing depending on the main.

The pattern is easier to remember than it looks: 12 nicks with an even main (6 or 8), 11 nicks with a 7, and neither nicks with a 5 or 9. Whichever of 11 and 12 does not nick is an out.

Payouts

Our game pays every win at 1 to 1: a winning stake of 25 returns 50. In the historical game the setter could also lay odds once a chance was set, at rates reflecting the true chances of chance versus main; see the odds section. We do not implement odds betting, so the flat stake is the only bet.

Worked Examples

• Main 7, stake 25, throw 5-6 = 11. With a main of 7 an 11 is a nick. You win 25 on the first throw.
• Main 5, stake 25, throw 5-6 = 11. With a main of 5 an 11 is an out. You lose 25 on the first throw. Same dice, opposite result: the main is everything.
• Main 8, stake 50, throw 6-6 = 12. A 12 nicks an even main. You win 50.
• Main 7, stake 25, throw 2-2 = 4. The chance is 4. You now need a 4 before a 7. Throw 3-5 = 8: nothing. Throw 1-3 = 4: chance thrown, you win 25. Had a 7 come first, you would have lost.
• Main 9, stake 100, throw 4-5 = 9. A nick. You win 100.
• Main 6, stake 25, throw 4-4 = 8. The chance is 8. Throw 3-3 = 6: the main came first. You lose 25.

The Odds: Why 7 Is the Best Main

Two dice give 36 equally likely outcomes: one way to make 2 or 12, two for 3 or 11, three for 4 or 10, four for 5 or 9, five for 6 or 8, and six for 7. Every Hazard probability is built from those counts.

Once a chance is set, only two totals matter, the chance and the main; everything else is thrown again. So the chance of winning the race is simply ways to make the chance divided by ways to make the chance plus ways to make the main. With a main of 7 (six ways) and a chance of 4 (three ways), you win the race 3 times in 9, or 33.3 percent; with a chance of 8 against a main of 7 you win 5 in 11, or 45.5 percent. That is exactly the point-versus-seven arithmetic of craps.

The come-out is where mains differ. A 7 is the most common total, so a main of 7 nicks most often (6 ways plus 2 for the 11, 8 of 36), but for the same reason the chance races against a 7 are the hardest to win. A main of 5 nicks less often (4 of 36) and loses to both 11 and 12 on the come-out (4 of 36), but its chance races are easier because a 5 only comes up four ways. Adding everything up over all 36 first throws:

Seven is the best main, but only just: 49.29 percent, which is 1,952 wins in every 3,960 rounds. Mains of 5 and 9 trail by five hundredths of a point, and 6 and 8 are the worst at 48.83 percent. Notice that the 7 figure is the same 244-in-495 (49.29 percent) that the Pass Line wins in craps; Craps is Hazard with the main fixed at 7, and the Pass Line’s 1.41 percent house edge is the setter’s edge in Hazard.

The historical setter’s odds bet sat on top of this. Once a chance was set, the setter could offer to lay the true odds of main against chance, for example 2 to 1 against a chance of 4 or 10 with a main of 7, or 6 to 5 against a chance of 6 or 8, and skilled players of Hoyle’s day carried a table of these ratios in their heads. Where the setter shaded the odds in his own favor, that was the house edge; where he laid them exactly, the bet was fair, just as free odds are in craps today.

Hazard Strategy

The only decisions are which main to call and how much to stake, so strategy is short and mostly about not fooling yourself.

1. Call 7

It wins 49.29 percent of rounds against 49.24 for 5 or 9 and 48.83 for 6 or 8. Over 1,000 rounds at 25 chips the difference between 7 and 6 is about 230 chips of expectation. There is no situation in which another main is mathematically better; the American players who fixed the main at 7 were simply doing what the numbers said.

2. Know the come-out table for your main cold

Players lose money at Hazard by calling a 5 or 9 and then being surprised that 11 and 12 both throw out, or by expecting 11 to nick an 8. Our game lists the nick, out and chance numbers for the current main; in a live game you have to remember them.

3. A chance of 6 or 8 is your best race, 4 or 10 your worst

With a main of 7 you win a chance of 6 or 8 five times in eleven (45.5 percent), a 5 or 9 two in five (40 percent) and a 4 or 10 one in three (33.3 percent). Where odds can be laid against the chance, take them only at or better than these ratios.

4. Stake in units, not in feelings

With 1,000 chips and a 25-chip stake you have forty units, which is plenty of cushion for a game where nearly half of all rounds win. Staking 100 a round leaves ten units, and a run of ten losses in a near-even game arrives about once in every thousand ten-round stretches.

5. Do not confuse a long chance race with a bad one

A chance of 4 against a main of 7 can take a dozen throws to resolve, because 27 of 36 totals are neither number. The length of the race does not change the odds: it is 3 to 6 against you on every throw that matters, no matter how many blanks come first.

6. The come-out is the only place your choice matters

Once a chance is set the game is a pure race between two totals, and nothing you chose affects it. Your main only changes the first throw, which is why the setter’s odds were historically laid after the chance was set.

7. Pushing a win is not a strategy

Doubling the stake after a nick, or after a loss, does not change the setter’s 1.41 percent edge; it only changes how quickly your bankroll swings. Fixed units and a stop point beat any progression.

Common Mistakes

• Treating 11 as always good. It nicks only when the main is 7. Against a 5, 6, 8 or 9 it is an out.
• Treating 12 as always bad. It nicks with a main of 6 or 8.
• Forgetting the main after a chance is set. Once you have a chance of 8 with a main of 7, the 7 is now the number you fear. Craps players find this natural; new players often cheer a 7.
• Changing mains mid-round. The main is fixed once the first throw is made. Our game locks the main buttons until the round resolves.
• Believing the Hazarth legend. It is a good story, and it is not history. Cite Chaucer instead.

Variants and House Rules

• Setter’s odds. The classic clubs allowed odds to be laid on chance versus main after the come-out. Hoyle gives the ratios; laid at true odds they are the ancestor of free odds in craps. Our game keeps a flat 1 to 1 stake for simplicity.
• Grand Hazard is a different game, a three-dice banking layout closer to Chuck-a-Luck and Sic Bo, sharing only the name.
• Passing the box. In the historical game the caster kept the dice until throwing out three times, then passed them on. With one caster in our game, the box never passes.
• French Hazard versus English Hazard. In nineteenth-century clubs “French Hazard” meant a game banked by the house, and “English Hazard” the player-versus-player version with a setter. The throwing rules are the same.
• Craps. The most important variant of all: main fixed at 7, a Pass and Don’t Pass side, and a layout of extra bets. We have a full Craps page.

If you like the pace of throwing for a number, Chicago runs through every total from 2 to 12, and Sevens Out makes the 7 the enemy in a push-your-luck race.

Glossary

• Caster: The player throwing the dice.
• Setter: The player (or house) who covers the caster’s stake and may lay odds.
• Main: The number, 5 to 9, called by the caster before the first throw.
• Nick: A first throw that wins at once: the main, or 11 or 12 as the table specifies.
• Out / throwing out / crabs: A first throw that loses at once: 2, 3, or 11 or 12 as the table specifies.
• Chance: The first-throw total, other than a nick or out, that the caster must repeat before the main.
• Box: The cup the dice are thrown from; “passing the box” means the caster’s turn ending.
• Hazardry: Chaucer’s word for dicing as a vice.

Play Hazard Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page is free play with virtual chips only. You are the caster with a 1,000-chip bankroll. Choose a main from the row of buttons (7 is selected by default, and each button’s label tells a screen reader its win rate), add 5, 25 or 100 chips to your stake, and click Throw. The round indicator shows MAIN and your number during the come-out, then flips to CHANCE with the chance number once one is set, and the “Your Main” table beside the dice lists exactly which totals nick, throw out or become the chance for the main you have chosen. Nicks and chances thrown pay 1 to 1; outs and mains thrown lose the stake. The main and stake are locked while a chance is live, the throw history colors each total green (win), red (loss) or yellow (chance set), and the log records every throw. If your bankroll falls below 5 chips the game ends and Play again resets it to 1,000; your best bankroll is kept on this device only. There is no real money, no account and nothing to download. Call your main and throw the dice.