Big Brother 26 Winner Chelsie Reveals Her ‘Last Strategic’ Move

Big Brother 26 winner Cheslie Baham masterfully puppeteered all season long, but she didn’t fully own up to it to the jury with good reason.

“I downplayed it a hundred percent for two reasons,” Chelsie, 27, exclusively told Us Weekly on Monday, October 14, following the Big Brother 26 finale. “No. 1, I didn’t want to overly gloat next to my friend Makensy [Manbeck]. I didn’t wanna do that. She took me to the final two.”

Chelsie explained that she opted to give the jury some “general notes” of her game to give them “the gist” of her strategy.

“I didn’t want to seem like I came off too cocky because that may also sway them to vote a certain way,” she said. “So I laid out facts. I felt like I did it in a gentle way and I didn’t go as hard in the paint like I could’ve.”

Before addressing the jury, fans heard Chelsie and Makensy, 22, talk about what they were going to say to their former houseguests. Makensy, who opted to evict Cam Sullivan-Brown over Chelsie after winning the final competition, confessed that she didn’t know what she was going to say. Chelsie claimed on camera that she didn’t have any final remarks prepared either. However, Cheslie confessed to Us that was one of her “last strategic moves” of the season.

“This girl knew I was really good with my words and I feared if I told her I was overly prepared for this, that she would hesitate taking me to the final two,” she confessed. “So I wanted to play it like, ‘This is no big deal. I don’t know [what] I’m gonna say.’I knew exactly what I was gonna say.”

Chelsie believed that her decision to tone down her explanation “ended up benefiting” her in the long run. The nonprofit director was unanimously voted the winner.

“I do think that some jury members came in with preconceived notions of how they thought we played the game,” she said of how she planned to address the jury. “But when I really laid out stats in my strategy and I knew what I was talking about, I think it was just the nail in the coffin for them to say, ‘Hey, I may have been swaying either way, but Chelsie has presented something that is hard to beat.’”

While many fans saw Cheslie as the clear frontrunner, she confessed that she was “very shocked” to win over all the jury members including Angela Murray and Leah Peters.

“It completely took me by surprise. I thought because of Angela and Leah — not only Angela’s question to me in the jury, but me getting Leah out really through Makensy’s HOH — I thought that those two for sure were gonna vote for Makensy,” Chelsie shared. “So when I saw their keys pulled out with my name, I said, ‘If I got them two, I got the rest of the house.’”

With reporting Sara Donnellan