Player of the Month – Niko

Player of the Month – NiKo

The Bosnian rifler and secondary AWPer for FaZe Clan performed far better than the rest of his teammates in February. As you can see in the infographic, with a total 1.25 rating formed from all matches in the past month, NiKo is more than 10 points ahead of the second-ranked player, Håvard “rain” Nygaard.

NiKo’s best performance came in FaZe’s 2:0 win against Cloud9, when he averaged a team-leading 1.62 rating and 99.5 damage per round. He also played well versus Renegades in the quarter-finals of StarSeries I-League, ending with a 1.39 rating. In the end, he finished with a 1.44 KDR on the maps that his team won.

The problem was that NiKo played under his usual class when FaZe lost the matches in the third-place decider and semi-finals.

Nikola performed well in the following Intel Extreme Masters competition in Katowice. He showed one of the best ever ratings (2.70) against ORDER in the group stage of the tournament.

His good performance continued in the playoffs, in which his 1.23 rating ranked him third behind NiP’s William “draken” Sundin and the MVP Robin “flusha” Rönnquist.

On top of that, NiKo had the highest impact rating of all players, completing the most maps with a score of 1.30 or better, even more than flusha.

Last but not least, the 21-year-old led 5 of the 11 different tournament leaderboards.

Player of the month – Tournaments

As we already mentioned, NiKo, along with his FaZe clan, participated in both big events in February – StarSeries I-League and Intel Extreme Masters.

Moreover, he played in all ongoing leagues such as ESL Pro League for example. We will take a closer look at his performance in all those events.

Earlier in the month, Nikola participated in 8 matches from the ESL PRO League,  where along with his teammates, he won 5 from 8 matches and ended with a 1.15 rating. His best score in EPL battles was 1.84 vs AGO, while he was really below the expectations when FaZe lost to Navi and NiKo ended with 0.47 rating.

In the StarSeries I-league, Kovach participated in 15 matches. FaZe won 9 of these and NiKo finished the period with a 1.20 rating. His best performance was in the 16:1 win over Cloud 9 (2.08 KDR).

The talent continued his upward form and he ended IEM Katowice 2018 with 1.36 average rating from 15 matches.  One critical moment in the player’s performance was in the third map of the Grand Final against fnatic, where NiKo had a 0.39 rating, one of the lowest in February.

NiKo History

Nikola “NiKo” Kovach is well-recognized as one of the best players in the world. Along with Marcelo “coldzera” David, Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev, and Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo, he has been part of every CS: GO highlight compilation.

His history in competitive gaming dates back from early 2013 when he joined team Refuse. After two more years in iNation, GamePub, and aimface, NiKo was transferred to the German giant mousesports in the beginning of 2015.

In that period, he establishes himself as one of the best in the world, famous for the insane Deagle plays that were able to turn every match in mousesports’ favor. In the 2017 transfer period, NiKo was added to the international roster of FaZe Clan.

Together with his teammates, they managed to claim the #1 in the world ranking.  Next goal in front of the organization is to win the CS: GO major and we believe that Nikola will be the foundation of success for the team!