Alex Botez Wins $250,000 ClubWPT Gold Poker Champs Title
The chess streamer beat Sodapoppin in the creator-focused heads-up final for her largest recorded poker tournament score.
Alex Botez won ClubWPT Gold’s Poker Champs, beating streamer Thomas “Sodapoppin” Morris in the best-of-three heads-up final to take the $250,000 top prize. The eight-player creator tournament carried a $500,000 prize pool, with Morris collecting $125,000 as runner-up.
Botez’s win came on Sept. 26 and marked the largest recorded tournament cash of her poker career. She first eliminated Eric “Erobb221” Lamont Robbins Jr. on Sept. 24, a result that guaranteed her at least $50,000, then beat PaymoneyWubby in the semifinal after building better than a 2-to-1 lead.
As we reported Sept. 19, ClubWPT Gold and Doug Polk had set Poker Champs as a $500,000 streamer heads-up event running through Sept. 26. The format guaranteed first-round winners at least $50,000, while semifinal losers received $75,000, the runner-up $125,000 and the champion $250,000; only the four semifinalists were paid.
Against Morris, Botez won the first final match after making a jack-high straight and picking off a king-high bluff. She ended the second match, and the tournament, by calling Morris’ all-in with pocket tens on an ace-ace-two board. Morris again held king-high for a bluff.
The ClubWPT Gold event was built around livestream creators rather than established professional poker players. The field included Botez, xQc, Sodapoppin, Erobb221, Tyler1, Emiru and YourRAGE, while participants streamed their own view of the matches and Polk hosted a separate cards-up broadcast with hole cards and webcam feeds.
Botez is a Canadian chess player and streamer who holds the Woman FIDE Master title. Her previous poker results included a $10,815 victory in a $550 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure side event in 2023, plus $89,490 across two WSOP Paradise cashes in 2024. She also won $456,900 in a 2022 Hustler Casino Live game.
Botez and her sister Andrea rose to prominence as online streamers around 2020. Their BotezLive YouTube channel had recently passed 2 million subscribers, while its Twitch account had 1.3 million followers.
