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| Debbie's husband David "Rabbi" Danheiser |
Deborah "Debbie" Heidekrueger is the fourth woman inducted into the Poker and Casino Cheats Hall of Fame. The longtime wife of professional tournament poker player David "Rabbi" Danheiser, Debbie was born in Chicago in 1951 and moved out to Las Vegas, Nevada in the late 1980s after having been found guilty of a financial crime by an Illinois court. As a recent arrival to Sin City, Heidekrueger did not waste much time learning the trade of cheating at gambling. She began as a poker cheat working collusion teams on Vegas's and Reno's poker tables before taking her act to the Caribbean and finally Atlantic City when the New Jersey gambling town legalized casino poker in the early 90s.
Heidekrueger seemed destined to remain a lifelong poker cheat but then in 1992 she met Mark "Balls" Abramowitz during a poker collusion cheat trip in Aruba. Abramowitz, also a Cheating Hall of Fame inductee, was at the island resort working the blackjack and craps tables. He also played poker on the square whenever he took breaks from cheating the casinos. It was in one of these cash games that he caught on to Heidekrueger's collusion team working the game he was playing in. Balls found the heavyset blond woman interesting and decided to approach her.
The two quickly formed an amicable relationship, and Balls even more quickly suggested to Heidekrueger that she join his own cheat team as a claimer. His reasoning was in direct contrast to the usual beautiful female casino cheat who could play on male casino bosses' egos to get the money off the tables. He figured, Who would ever suspect a very large woman to be a casino cheat?
He was right! After instilling confidence in a very shaky Heidekrueger, he managed to get her to claim some roulette pastposts he put in on the wheels. But this did not come easy. In one particular scenario with a black $100 chip successfully pastposted straight-up on a number waiting for a $3,500 payoff, Debbie froze up on the claim. An enterprizing guy wearing a ball cap who had absolutely nothing to do with the move took advantage when a pit boss came over to the roulette wheel and asked whose $100 chip was sitting on the winning number. The casino ended up paying the guy the $3,500 that Heidekrueger whould have been paid had she opened up her mouth.
But Balls did not give up on her. After a year of her successful roulette claiming he decided it was time to teach her the blackjack ten-oh-five move. Although she did not have the smooth buttery fingers and hands that most casino-cheat mechanics have, she managed to learn the basics of the move--and then developed the balls to lay it in and claim it all by herself. Her first successful lay and claim of a blackjack pastpost took place at the Tropicana casino in Las Vegas in 1993. From there it was smooth sailing for the large female pastposter. She really took off when the new MGM Grand opened in Vegas in early 1993. During several championship boxing matches staged there, including those featuring George Foreman, Heidekrueger TKO'd the tables, perforing more than a hundred ten-oh-fives and fifty two-thousand-twenty-fives (yellow $1,000 chips switched in for green $25 chips) at the MGM Grand alone. She hit other Strip casinos in Vegas and then Balls took her on the road to Atlantic City, the Caribbean and Europe. Heidekrueger became the most successful female blackjack mechanic in history, substituting matronly charm for a lack of sex appeal to workover the pit bosses who just loved paying her pastposts.
But then she got greedy. During the Memorial Day weekend of 1993, Heidekrueger went to Lake Tahoe by herself to bail out her husband who owed a lot of money from poker loans. Despite her skills on the blackjack tables, Debbie did not have enough experience and overall casino knowledge to protect her own ass while cheating casinos. She got busted at Caesars Tahoe doing a blackjack move and ended up spending six months in the Douglas County jail. She gave up casino cheating for six years but then returned to it when Balls showed her the famed Savannah move that he'd learned from Hall of Fame casino cheat Richard Marcus. Ironically, Debbie got caught doing the Savannah at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and got taken to the security back room. However, she did not get arrested due to a lack of evidence. After that incident, Heidekrueger recruited several inexperienced casino people, mostly women and ex-dealers, whom she tried to teach the Savannah. After having limited success with her associates, Heidekrueger retired from casino cheating in the year 2000. Currently she sweats the poker action of her husband David "Rabbi" Danheiser.
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