It’s a rowdy Sunday at Alexandra Palace, and Andy Boulton has one dart at bullseye to win a leg at the world championship. His opponent, Daniel Baggish, is back on 135: a difficult outshot, but not impossible. So Boulton now has a decision. Does he aim his last dart at bull, the most difficult double on the board? Or does he instead throw a single 18 or single 10 to set up a much easier finish on his next visit, and gamble on Baggish missing?

More than 3,000 miles away, in wintry small-town Massachusetts, a 27-year-old postal worker called Christopher Kempf knows the precise answer. Based on his exhaustive analysis of millions of darts thrown on the Professional Darts Corporation tour, he knows that a player on 50 with a single dart remaining should throw for the bull only if their opponent has a better than 10% chance of checking out. He knows, too, that the success rate of attempts at 135 is only 4.4%.

So Boulton should gamble. Instead, he throws for the bull, leaving himself 25. Although Baggish fails to check out 135, Boulton has left himself only two darts at a double. He misses both. From 2-1 up, Boulton is ultimately beaten, his decision to take on the bull very possibly the difference between winning and losing.

Welcome to the game behind the game. Something strange is happening in the cosy world of darts: a quiet movement stirring far away from its humble heartlands. Its followers are clad not in fancy dress but sensible shirts, bearing not pitchers of beer but laptops and regressive analyses. Darts, in many ways the original numbers game, is finally getting its stats revolution.

Quick Guide Roundup: Wright given elf scare by Malicdem Show Wright survives elf scare against Malicdem Peter Wright pulled off a dramatic escape against qualifier Noel Malicdem, riding his luck through a nerve-jangling deciding set before prevailing in a sudden-death leg. Wright's bright green hair and elf-themed outfit were more dazzling than his performance, and the first two sets were shared as Malicdem, who is not ranked on the PDC order of merit, belied his underdog status. The Filipino broke Wright to move 2-1 up in the fifth set, but the former finalist found a last-ditch moment of inspiration, hitting a nerveless 140 checkout after Malicdem missed a match dart at the bull. Wright tried to repeat the trick in the eighth leg, but pulled his dart at double top – only for Malicdem to miss three darts at double 13 with the break of throw in his grasp. At 5-5, Wright threw first and ran away with the sudden-death shootout. Dark horse Aspinall makes nervy start Nathan Aspinall made a slow start against US qualifier Danny Baggish but recovered from a set down to win 3-1. Stockport's Aspinall, who kickstarted a breakthrough season with a run to the semis here last year, averaged 95.38 to set up a third-round meeting with Krzysztof Ratajski.

"I was so nervous and desperate to win, I've never felt like I did at the end of that match," Aspinall admitted. "I've come from nowhere to a top 16 player in 12 months so there was a lot of pressure on my shoulders." In an all-European battle, Germany's Max Hopp outlasted Benito van de Pas in another five-set thriller. Hopp led the averages by five points, but the Dutchman kept landing doubles to stay in the match. The No 24 seed swept the deciding set, pinning double eight for the crucial break. Joe Cullen's Ally Pally agony continued as the No 15 seed was beaten by Germany's Nico Kurz. Cullen has now won just one match in 10 world championship appearances, as his 22-year-old opponent fought back from a set down to win 3-1 – taking the fourth set from 2-0 down. In the afternoon session, 'Rapid' Ricky Evans secured an eye-catching third-round tie with Michael van Gerwen by beating Mark McGenney 3-1, finishing the match with a 170 checkout. Mervyn King was pushed all the way by Irish teenager Ciaran Teehan, but held his nerve to win the deciding set. Things were far more straightforward for fellow seeds Darren Webster and Jonny Clayton, who whitewashed Yuki Yamada and Jan Dekker respectively. – Niall McVeigh Photograph: Shane Healey/Rex Features

Like many of the new breed of analysts, Kempf got into darts quite by accident. Four years ago he had never even seen a game. One day he stumbled across a YouTube video of Michael van Gerwen’s 17 perfect darts at the world championship, and instantly grasped the untapped potential of advanced analysis in a game that has got by on only the most basic of metrics. “A single-match average isn’t going to tell you all that much,” says Burton DeWitt, a property lawyer from Houston and host of the Weekly Dartscast podcast. “It doesn’t tell you where a player is doing well, where a player is struggling.”

Through his Twitter account and as the Professional Darts Corporation’s official analyst, Kempf delves for the deeper truths within the game, spending between six and eight hours a day producing graphs, compiling tables, parsing data. Which players adore double-top, and which avoid it like the plague? Who’s most likely to hit a treble-one at the crucial moment? What’s the most efficient way of checking out 92? (Contrary to popular belief, treble 20 followed by double 16 is marginally more successful than starting on the bull.)

Younger players are showing more awareness of the importance of data analysis as the sport becomes ever more globally popular. Photograph: Alex Davidson/Getty Images

The repetitive nature of the sport, Kempf says, makes it a perfect fit for analysis. So why has it taken so long? Part of the reason is logistical: until 2016, the PDC was still collating all its match data on handwritten scoresheets. It took the arrival of a company called Sportradar, and an innovative app called DartConnect, to digitise the process. Now, for the first time, dart-by-dart data is available for all televised events, opening up a new, glorious world of insights.

We now know, for example, that the least hit segment on the board is double 17. We know that players are becoming increasingly proficient on cover shots such as treble 19 and treble 18. And we know that James Wade is one of the best bullseye throwers in the game, compensating for his relative lack of heavy scoring.

There remains, however, one significant constituency of the game to whom this remains of very little interest: the players themselves. Talk to the game’s leading names and what emerges is a marked indifference – verging on outright hostility – to the idea of analysis, even if it might benefit them. “Too much data,” complains the world championship semi-finalist Nathan Aspinall. “I don’t use it, I don’t need it,” scoffs Van Gerwen, the triple world champion. “You have technology to calculate double percentages, analyse games, whatever. Nah. In my shoes, I should be good at any double.”

Gerwyn Price, the world No 3, is another sceptic. “As soon as you go too deep, you’re back to square one,” he says. “You start thinking: oh, my percentage is down on double 10, then you’re going different routes. You’re just mentally draining yourself.”

Part of the resistance, you sense, is cultural: an in-built wariness of these smart American fanboys coming into darts and joylessly reducing their beloved game to a spreadsheet exercise. For many players, darts is a game of feel and mindset. “There’s always been this sense that darts is entirely a psychological game, rather than a game of skill,” says Kempf. Even so, not everyone is a sceptic. Kempf reveals that a handful of players have sought him out for consultation. The one factor that unites them? They are emerging players in their 20s, part of the new generation who sees darts not as a pub game, but as a viable sporting career, one in which fine margins can make all the difference.

Here, perhaps, lies the rub. The sport’s prize money now runs into the tens of millions. The number of aspirant players trying to break into it has never been higher. The thirst for darts now spans every continent. No sport this big can ever simply be one thing to one audience, if ever it was. Perhaps the rise of the analysts is merely a sign that darts, the game of the English pub, is evolving into something else entirely.