'Big Brother' winner Chelsie Baham on Makensy's decision, her biggest regrets and more

Chelsie Baham made history during the "Big Brother" season 26 finale .

She became the third winner in "Big Brother" U.S. history and the first woman winner to ever play a perfect game : Baham never received an eviction vote, and the entire jury unanimously voted for her to win.

"That's crazy," she said to The Enquirer Oct. 14, roughly 14 hours after "Big Brother" crowned her the winner of season 26. "Winning 'Big Brother' was obviously a dream, but being a record-setter winner was not something that I anticipated. So how I feel about that has not sunken in yet. I'm still trying to revel in the fact that I actually won this game."

Although she was one of the favorites pretty early on, Baham did come across challenges.

Her Pentagon alliance member, Cedric Hodges, was surprisingly evicted in Week 4 . Tucker Des Lauriers then nominated her for eviction the following week. She won the AI Arena to save herself but saw her ally Brooklyn Rivera go home over her other alliance member, Cam Sullivan-Brown.

That was the point in the season when she shifted her game.

"I didn't like this feeling of having to survive to determine my fate," she said. "So Day 38, I repositioned myself. And I said, 'How do I ensure I play a game where I don't have to see this block again? How do I be strategic with every single thing I do in this game?' ... I said 'I don't want to have to rely on winning competitions to survive. Even if I don't win, I want to get to the end. How do I do that?' And I made decisions that way."

She also had to navigate big personalities. Angela Murray and Des Lauriers were two of the most entertaining, yet chaotic, players "Big Brother" fans have watched in years.

They weren't afraid to make big moves, and they didn't shy away from public confrontation.

"I'm a big personality too, so I'm one of the crazies. I had to figure out how to navigate my own self," she said. "I just knew, 'Know when to get your one-on-one time together with myself; nobody else.' Because if you're around the crazy too much, you become it and you get annoyed and you start to pop off. So I always wanted to make sure, no matter how a player was playing in this game, no matter how crazy or wild, that they didn't take me to that place."

There was still respect for those big players, though.

"They were entertaining, and I love them both, so it was fun to watch."

How she won on finale night

Baham sat in the final two chairs during the season finale next to Makensy Manbeck, who was a comp beast throughout the season but didn't have the same strategic resume as Baham.

Manbeck won the final Head of Household competition of the season and arguably made a $750,000 mistake by bringing Baham to the end with her over Sullivan-Brown.

"I wasn't surprised necessarily (by Makensy's decision); there was an ounce of me that thought she was going to make a big game move and get me out," she said. "However, she was very, very confident, as she should have been, in the game that she played. The only error in that is she thought that the amount of competitions she won would just outweigh any type of game that either Cam or I played, so I just let her believe that."

"She was like, 'No matter who I sit next to, I'm going to win.' And she'd rather (have) me next to her than Cam, not knowing that I had a resume in my pocket that I was just waiting to bust out in the right time."

Had Manbeck made the big move to get Baham out, though, the season 26 winner says she would have voted for Manbeck in the end over Sullivan-Brown.

Chelsie's biggest regrets from the season

There were still things Baham wishes she would have done differently.

She said she believes her goodbye messages to the jury could have been more strategic and calculated to reflect what she had done in the game, and she thinks she trusted people too soon in the house.

"I should have been a little bit slower to joining alliances because it did get me in trouble," Baham said.

But everything she did in the house worked out, and she came out of it as the season's winner.

"The biggest surprise for me is how people viewed the game that I played," she said. "When you're in it, you don't see the full picture. So I didn't see really the massive amount of influence that I had in this season and how the trajectory of this season went. ... I didn't know that I was kind of the center point of all of that stuff. Looking back, I'm like 'Yeah, that makes sense.' But that was shocking. It was shocking to see how people respected that aspect of my game."

(This story was updated to add a video.)

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: 'Big Brother' winner Chelsie Baham on Makensy's decision, her biggest regrets and more