How is fantasy sports different from sports betting? The lines are still murky.

What is fantasy sports and what is sports gambling?

If it feels like you’re reading the beginning of an article from 2015,when lines were being blurred as DraftKings and FanDuel’s daily fantasy sports products became widely popular, it’s because, eight years later, those lines still aren’t very clear, at least not in some states.

Showing how is rather easy. I live in Philadelphia, in a state where sports betting is legal and regulated. A good friend of mine lives in Los Angeles, in a state where sports betting legislation once again failed to pass last year.

My friend is a bettor, so he was a willing participant when I asked him to help out and log into his account on PrizePicks, a daily fantasy sports website that is legal in California. He’s a baseball fan, too, and played it a lot better than I did in high school. I gave him a simple task on July 26: Send me your three favorite baseball player props for that night’s Major League Baseball action. A few minutes later, he sent a screenshot with the picks.

South Jersey native Zac Gallen, who pitches for the Diamondbacks, was playing in a day game vs. St. Louis and needed to record six or more strikeouts. Houston’s José Abreu needed to combine for two hits, runs or RBIs, and the same for the Mets’ Francisco Lindor.

Over in Pennsylvania, I logged into the DraftKings sportsbook app and put all three picks into a parlay. We each placed $25 on the outcome. And the screenshots of our picks looked nearly identical.

In one state, Pennsylvania, I was making a legal sports bet. In another, my friend was doing what some companies and laws claim is fantasy sports — a game of skill and not chance. Only Gallen’s prop was successful. Parlays, or “power plays,” as PrizePicks calls them, remain difficult to hit.

There is nothing interesting about the bet I made on DraftKings. There is something a bit more complex about what my friend was doing in California.

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PrizePicks, a rapidly growing Atlanta-based company, isn’t alone in its parlay-prop-style gaming endeavor. Several companies have sprouted up and attracted loads of customers, especially in states where sports betting is not yet legal and regulated. Despite widespread legalization, the three largest states in the U.S. by population — California, Texas, and Florida — do not yet allow online sports betting. But they all allow fantasy operators like PrizePicks, Underdog, Thrive, Boom, and others, like the Jake Paul-back Betr.

Some of those operators are using the same playbook used by DraftKings and FanDuel eight years ago that created carve-out laws and regulations to maintain legality. However, critics worry about how they’re taking advantage of existing laws and offering a product that takes daily fantasy sports a step further than it was intended and into a murky area that is toeing — and sometimes overstepping — the line and dipping into what is undoubtedly sports betting.

Some of the more popular daily fantasy games being offered by these operators no longer involve creating a full lineup of players and entering a contest against other fantasy sports players. What’s now being offered in some jurisdictions amounts to against-the-house products that blur the line between fantasy and betting.

“These companies are offering a parlay product that is indistinguishable from sports betting,” said Dustin Gouker, a sports betting analyst and consultant who was a former executive at Catena Media, which covers the gambling industry. “You’re definitely parsing to find any difference between that and parlay betting.”

PrizePicks, which does not operate in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or Delaware, declined to comment on the record for this story. Underdog, a New York-based start-up that has aspirations of being a player in the sports betting space, also declined comment and instead referred The Inquirer to a public relations firm that represents the Coalition for Fantasy Sports — a group that includes PrizePicks, Underdog, and Sleeper, another popular fantasy company.

Regarding the nearly identical wagers made in Pennsylvania and California, the coalition did not explicitly explain how they were different but said, in part, in an emailed statement that “there are a number of rules that “pick ‘em” games must follow to be considered fantasy sports.”

The coalition said that making a determination on whether a player’s stats will be achieved during a given game or event is a “skilled determination.”

But some state regulators are making distinctions between what is fantasy sports and what is sports betting.

In an Aug. 2 update, the New York State Gaming Commission rejected a daily fantasy sports change requested by a commenter that would allow pick ’em games like the one in California.

In part, the gaming commission’s response read: “A commenter objected to proposed Rule 5602.1(a)(4), which would make explicit that contests shall not be based on proposition betting or contests that have the effect of mimicking proposition betting. The Commission believes that a contest offering that is essentially sports betting ...

The Gaming Control Unit in Maine also recently sent a notice of complaint to Underdog for offering unlicensed sports betting.

Last year, regulators in Maryland and West Virginia also said, according to a recent Wall Street Journal story, that sports wagering was being offered without a sports betting license in their states.

“The growing number of state regulators reaffirming that house-backed player prop parlays may only be offered pursuant to the licensing, regulation and taxation regimes governing sports betting in those states highlights the importance of ensuring a clear delineation between operators who adhere to these regulatory requirements and those who don’t,” FanDuel president Christian Genetski said in an emailed statement.

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It’s easy to see how some of the fantasy vs. betting lines are being blurred.

Boom Fantasy, another popular app, offered a promotion in July that was sent to email inboxes. It offered players the ability to combine any one “selection” — it didn’t call it a player “prop,” probably intentionally — with Shohei Ohtani hitting fewer than 999.5 home runs on that night.

Ohtani might be the most superhuman baseball player we’ve ever seen, but he’s certainly not hitting 1,000 home runs in a single game. What we were left with was a “fantasy” sports operator offering what is essentially a single-outcome wager on a player prop. That is, by almost any definition, sports betting.

The Coalition for Fantasy Sports said it was inaccurate “to conflate this promotion with sports betting,” which goes back to its assertion — and some of the legal framework — that says predicting stats is a skillful endeavor.

But, the coalition said: “We believe it’s important for fantasy sports operators to be thoughtful on how promotions are structured to ensure that they are appropriate and foster responsible play.”

(Editor’s note: The Inquirer, through its media partnership with Better Collective, has a financial relationship with several fantasy sports operators, including PrizePicks and Underdog.)

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How did we get here? Insert the Spiderman pointing meme.

As Gouker — who has written extensively on the topic — pointed out, FanDuel and DraftKings are “directly responsible for the environment that allowed the environment for these companies.”

About eight years ago, those two mammoth companies — they now make up the lion’s share of sports betting handle across the U.S. — went on a lobbying blitz that resulted in carve-out laws to the 2006 Unlawful internet Gambling Enforcement Act in a majority of states that made daily fantasy sports legal. It was labeled a game of skill. But the majority, if not all of the daily fantasy games at the time, revolved around setting fantasy lineups based on salary caps and involved players entering contests against other players. It’s unclear if regulators at the time realized they were signing up for laws that would essentially allow parlay-style betting in what fantasy operators label as “pick ‘em” contests.

“Fantasy sports is not limited to only FanDuel and DraftKings’ salary cap contests,” Underdog co-CEO Jeremy Levine said in a letter posted to the company’s website Wednesday. “The laws they wrote say fantasy sports is far broader than just salary cap.”

There are some states that allow daily fantasy sports contests but forbid the against-the-house-style of games allowed in others.

Some critics are outright accusing fantasy sports operators of engaging in illegal activity.

At a July panel in front of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States, FanDuel’s head of U.S. state government relations, Cesar Fernandez, said: “There are companies today posing as fantasy sports operators and they are running illegal sportsbooks.”

The Coalition for Fantasy Sports disagrees.

“This false narrative being spread by both FanDuel and DraftKings is simply an attempt to squash competition and position themselves as the only games in town,” the organization said in a statement. “They have been unable or unwilling to create better, more innovative fantasy sports games and instead are focused on creating monopolies. Their anti-competitive approach and attempts to minimize consumer options will only harm the millions of Americans that love playing fantasy sports.”

Further, Underdog’s letter to its customers said that FanDuel and DraftKings “have spent the last year using every lever available to them: leaning on state governments, the media, business partners, and advertising entities, to try to stop us from offering our products to you.”

Sources objected to the notion that big companies like FanDuel and DraftKings were only trying to stifle competition.

The bigger issue, multiple sources said, is that fantasy operators are essentially offering the same type of parlay products, but outside the established regulatory framework that exists in sports betting — resulting in those operators paying less in taxes and regulatory fees than they would have to if they were classified as sports betting.

Some critics also worry about the age requirements and how they differ from traditional sports betting, where only those 21 and older can participate. PrizePicks recently raised its age requirement to 19 in an effort to cut down on the number of high schoolers using the product. Others, like Underdog and Sleeper, still allow 18-year-olds to play if that is the legal age for fantasy sports in the state they’re playing in.

A survey released in May by the NCAA indicated that sports betting was widespread on college campuses. And 58% of 18- to 22-year-olds said they had participated in at least one sports betting activity. It’s unclear what the rate of sports gambling or daily fantasy sports participation is among those who are under 21.

The Coalition for Fantasy Sports said the average age of its players across the PrizePicks, Underdog, and Sleeper platforms was about 29.

Right now, many fantasy operators are “filling a need,” Gouker said, and have to this point been “pretty good actors.”

For now, fantasy sports apps remain the only way to legally get anything close to sports betting for millions of Americans. But for how long remains unclear. Regulators seem poised to continue to crack down on pick ‘em-style contests, but it’s unlikely that widespread changes to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act or other fantasy-related laws and regulations are on the horizon that would force daily fantasy companies out of business.

All of this uproar just leads back to the argument of what is skill vs. what is chance? What is gambling and what is fantasy sports?

As Gouker wrote in an article this week, it can be both things, but with a caveat: “In the Venn diagram of sports betting and fantasy sports, these products are in the overlapping sections. But just because you’re both doesn’t mean you only get treated as fantasy.”