Alex Botez Takes Down ClubWPT Gold’s $500,000 Poker Champs for $250,000
Alex Botez won ClubWPT Gold’s Poker Champs tournament over the weekend, taking down an eight-player heads-up shootout with a $500,000 prize pool to bank $250,000, according to Card Player. The result is the largest tournament payday of her career.
Botez, a 31-year-old Canadian former child chess prodigy who now streams alongside her sister Andrea, opened her run on Sept. 24 by eliminating fellow streamer Eric “Erobb221” Lamont Robbins Jr., a win worth at least $50,000. Two days later she advanced past “PaymoneyWubby” in the semifinals, building a lead of more than 2:1 before closing out the match on a hand where she called Wubby’s all-in with K-3 on a King-high board after he had committed his stack on the turn. Wubby showed two red queens, but the river changed nothing and Botez’s kicker held up.
The final against Sodapoppin
With $125,000 already secured, Botez met Thomas Chance Morris, known online as “Sodapoppin,” in the best-of-three final. She won the first match after turning a jack-high straight and catching Morris bluffing with king-high. In the decisive second match, Botez called an all-in from Morris holding pocket tens on an ace-high, two-spade board, and again caught him bluffing with king-high. The turn and river changed nothing, sealing her $250,000 victory.
Botez already had a handful of notable tournament results before this win. She cashed the 2023 World Series of Poker Main Event, finishing 1,040th, and made two runs at WSOP Paradise in 2024, placing 60th in a $10,000 event and 187th in the $25,000 Super Main Event for a combined $89,490. She also won a $550 freezeout at the 2023 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure for $10,815. Outside of tournament poker, Botez won $456,900 in a widely watched 2022 episode of Hustler Casino Live that also featured Phil Hellmuth, Tom Dwan, Alan Keating, Mr. Beast and Tyler “Ninja” Blevins.
Botez holds the Woman FIDE Master title in chess. She and her sister Andrea built a following starting around 2020 with chess-focused content before expanding into broader streaming, and their channels now count more than 2 million YouTube subscribers and 1.3 million Twitch followers.
ClubWPT Gold, the sweepstakes poker platform tied to the World Poker Tour brand, structured Poker Champs as a straight elimination bracket of one-on-one matches. Botez needed three wins to take the title, going through Robbins, Wubby and Morris in succession over the course of a single weekend.