Is theScore Bet Any Good in 2026?

• theScore Bet takes bets in 20 states today, down from the 21 states plus Washington, D.C. it launched with in December 2025.
• It is the same state-licensed sportsbook that ran as ESPN Bet until Dec. 1, 2025. Same company, same licenses, same account if you had one, so the legitimacy question mostly answers itself.
• The current welcome offer excludes anyone who registered a Penn Sports Interactive sportsbook account before a stated cutoff date, which covers every former ESPN Bet customer. That single clause changes what everything else is worth to you.
• theScore Bet is a licensed, regulated sportsbook in every state on its list.

A few things stood out along the way.

• The rebrand moved the name and nothing else. Your balance, open bets and history all came across untouched.
• The Bet Reset pays in five bonus bets, and a full $1,000 loss returns at most $909.09 in cash.
• Illinois charges $0.25 on every wager. On a $10 ticket that is a 2.5% surcharge before you look at the price.
• The app remains the best thing theScore Bet ships. The prop tree is the thinnest.
• PENN Play reaches a comped hotel room, but theScore Bet never states what a Tier Point is worth in cash.
• Against DraftKings and FanDuel, the case for theScore Bet is app quality and the PENN property tie-in. Price isn’t the argument.

theScore Bet operates in 20 US states. You have to be 21 in every one of them, for registration as much as for wagering.

Only four of those states get Hollywood Casino, PENN’s iCasino product, sharing a wallet with the sportsbook. Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The other 16 are sportsbook only.

Plenty of legal betting states carry no theScore Bet app at all, and it’s not a red flag. The footprint follows PENN Entertainment’s property map. Local law has nothing to do with it. Nevada, Vermont, Wyoming, Oregon, Delaware, Rhode Island and Montana are all missing because PENN owns no property and holds no direct license in any of them, so there’s nothing to launch no matter how mature the local market is.

New Jersey sports betting shows the other side of that. One of the oldest, deepest legal markets in the country, and theScore Bet is live there because PENN’s market-access partner, Resorts Casino Hotel, gives it a route in.

Two questions, two answers. “Is betting legal here” and “does theScore Bet operate here” are separate, and your state can clear the first without clearing the second.

Access runs on where you’re standing, not where you live. You can log in, deposit, withdraw and check your history from anywhere in the United States. Placing a bet takes being physically inside one of the 20 states below.

theScore Bet is the same sportsbook that ran as ESPN Bet until Dec. 1, 2025. PENN Entertainment and ESPN announced the change on Nov. 6, 2025. Same operating entity, Penn Sports Interactive, LLC. Same state licenses. Same customer accounts. Eight and a half months on, it’s closed history.

Why it happened is duller than the coverage made it sound. The original 2023 agreement built in a mutual right to end early, and either side could walk after year three if the book missed specific performance thresholds. Both took that exit instead of running out the ten-year term.

If you had an ESPN Bet account, everything came across on its own. Login, balance, open wagers, wagering history, account settings, Responsible Gaming limits, PENN Cash, PENN Play Credit and Tier Points. The one casualty was ESPN account linking, swapped for a link to theScore’s own media app.

Doing nothing through the migration preserved all of it except your eligibility for the current welcome offer. More on that in a moment.

Our ESPN Bet review carries the account-recovery steps, the full state-by-state transition table and the Washington, D.C. exit’s win-grading rules if you want the complete status story.

The Bet Reset is a bet-and-get. Not a deposit match, and not site credit sitting in your account at sign-up. Place a first cash wager, and if it loses, the stake comes back as bonus bets worth up to $1,000. theScore Bet’s own current promotion terms run the offer from July 1, 2026 through Dec. 31, 2026, with the eligibility cutoff at July 1, 2026, 9:00 a.m. ET.

The exclusion is the fact everything else hangs on. The offer is written for players who have never previously registered and deposited on a Penn Sports Interactive, LLC sports betting product, and that catches every migrated ESPN Bet customer through the operating entity instead of the brand name you remember. If your account existed before the cutoff, under either name, the Bet Reset is closed to it.

If you can claim it, read the structure before the headline number. The reward doesn’t land as one credit. It splits into five bonus bets, each worth 20% of your original stake. The clock is tight. Bonus bets are credited within 72 hours after the qualifying wager settles as a loss, and they expire seven days after that. A bonus bet also doesn’t return its own stake when it wins. You keep the winnings and nothing more.

Lose the full $1,000 and five $200 bonus bets land in your account. At a standard -110 price each one profits $181.82 if it wins, so five winners return $909.09 in cash. That’s the best case, and it assumes all five come in. Anything left unused after seven days is gone.

Cashing out the qualifying wager voids the offer outright. So does funding it from a bonus balance instead of cash, or having the wager voided.

theScore Bet’s Recurring Promotions

This is what you get if you’re already an account holder, so it deserves more weight than an afterthought. Parlay Club is the clearest current example, open to any registered, verified theScore Bet account, migrated or new. Opt in before the weekly period, place four cash parlays of $10 or more with four or more legs each, every leg priced at -500 or longer, and a $10 bonus bet lands whether the tickets win or lose. The -500 floor is the piece to notice. It kills the obvious move of stacking four heavy favorites to farm the promotion.

Sportsbook bonuses built this way pay you on volume you were placing anyway instead of handing over new money. Profit boosts and deposit-match offers rotate through on their own schedule. If you’re a returning customer, these are the offers to read every week. The welcome offer isn’t coming back, however long the account has been open.

Registration asks for your email address, a username and password, a phone number, your date of birth, your home address and the last four digits of your Social Security number. That last one looks intrusive and isn’t. A regulated sportsbook works under the same anti-money-laundering rules as your bank and has to hold a verifiable record of whoever holds the account.

You have to be 21 everywhere theScore Bet operates, at registration as well as at the bet slip. The identity requirement trips up more people than it should. theScore Bet wants a permanent US citizen with domestic identification, so foreign IDs and work-purpose-only documents get refused.

Geolocation is a separate gate from identity, and it’s the most common cause of a failed check. A VPN or a network routing through another state will fail location even when your identity cleared without a hitch.

Verification delays a withdrawal. It never delays a bet. You can deposit and wager before your documents clear, but you can’t get paid until they do, so upload your ID at signup instead of at your first cashout.

The hold on a two-way market moves with the prices posted on each side. At -110 both ways, the two implied probabilities add to 104.76%, a hold of roughly 4.55% of the pool. At -105 both ways, that drops to about 2.38%. Parlays compound the hold with every leg you add instead of discounting it. Two genuine coin-flip legs would pay $300 profit on a $100 stake. Two -110 legs pay $264, and the $36 gap is what stacking legs onto one ticket costs you.

Every state theScore Bet runs in licenses several competing sportsbooks. Nothing forces you to take the price on screen the way it would in a market with a lone licensed app. What bites here is theScore Bet’s own pricing and market depth against the two market leaders, which is a separate finding and worth keeping separate.

The Illinois Wager Fee

Illinois adds a $0.25 fee to every wager placed in the state. Win, lose, push or cash out early, you pay it. The fee counts toward your own responsible-gaming limits, and it comes back only if the wager itself is voided.

What it costs you depends entirely on your stake. On a $10 bet, a quarter is a 2.5% surcharge before the price enters into it. On a $100 bet the same quarter is 0.25%, close to nothing. Frequent small-stakes bettors carry the whole weight of it, and consolidating into fewer, larger tickets is the only way around that.

Illinois sports betting carries the charge on every ticket at theScore Bet, win or lose, so budget for it before it turns up on a bet slip.

What the Published Bet Limits Are Actually Worth

theScore Bet’s house rules set a $0.10 minimum wager, a $1,500,000 maximum wager and a $2,500,000 maximum payout, confirmed against the current New Jersey, New York and Missouri house rules.

The discretionary clause next to those figures matters more than the figures do. theScore Bet sets minimum and maximum wager limits wager by wager and patron by patron, at its own discretion, inside those outer bounds. That makes the $1,500,000 maximum a ceiling on the book’s exposure, never a floor under your access. A limit set well below it, on your account and not the next guy’s, is allowed by the same house rules that print the big figure.

The house rules as written document no specific pattern of limiting winning bettors past that general discretion. They do authorize restricting a promotion or a feature like cash-out patron by patron. The rules go no further than that.

The board covers what most people open an app for. Football, basketball, baseball and hockey at both the professional and college level, plus soccer, tennis, golf, mixed martial arts and motorsport. Bet types run moneylines, spreads, totals, alternate lines, player and game props, futures, parlays and round robins, the standard menu you’d recognize from any other regulated book.

Depth is where it thins. theScore Bet carries fewer alternate lines per game than DraftKings or FanDuel, a thinner prop tree on secondary players, and weaker coverage of niche sports and lower divisions than either market leader. Futures are there across championships, divisions and major awards, though futures pricing carries a wider margin at every book, theScore Bet included, so buy them deliberately and don’t shop them on price.

Bet sides, totals and standard parlays, and none of that will ever register with you. Grind obscure markets hunting soft numbers and it will, every week, and no amount of app polish covers it.

Same Game Parlay and Where It Stops

Same Game Parlay is eligible on the NHL, NFL, NBA and MLB. You can combine legs from different games on one ticket, so a same-game selection from one matchup and a moneyline from an unrelated game price as a single wager. Every same-event selection inside that ticket collapses into one leg for grading, which is why the slip shows one combined price instead of each selection listed out.

Two limits change how you should build one. Same Game Parlay is pre-game only, and once a game starts the tool disappears for that matchup. For a product that leans this hard on parlay marketing, that’s a real gap. The second limit is that not every eligible selection combines with every other. A moneyline and a point spread on the same event won’t parlay together, and neither will related markets tied to the same player. The bet slip flags the conflict and marks the offending legs while you’re building the ticket, before you place anything.

The theScore Bet College Player Prop Restriction

theScore Bet’s house rules restrict college player props differently in nearly every state that restricts them at all, and none of it is theScore Bet’s call. A state regulator writes the rule, and theScore Bet applies it the same way every other licensed book in that state has to.

Ohio’s version is the most specific. An individual college player prop is barred outright. A team prop survives only if it has, on a historical basis, been driven by the statistical performance of at least two players in over 50% of outcomes across a full season, and that turns market approval into a spreadsheet exercise.

Colorado, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Arizona and Virginia go broader, generally reaching any wager whose outcome depends on one athlete’s performance, in-game props included. Illinois, New Jersey and Iowa take the narrow, in-state route instead and block wagers tied to their own colleges rather than college sports generally. In Illinois that restriction reaches into parlays, so one Illinois college leg voids the whole ticket. Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Indiana and Louisiana carry no such prohibition in their house rules.

You’ll never see a rejected bet from any of it. A restricted market just never appears on the board. One grading trap deserves flagging on its own. A single-winner futures market, a conference or national championship, that includes a school your state restricts gets voided as no action instead of settled, which surprises anyone who moved states mid-season with that ticket still open.

A full sportsbook loads on desktop too, which surprises people who assume this is an app-only product. What desktop doesn’t get is BetVision, the in-stream NFL betting feature that lets you pick markets and place wagers without leaving the video. That one is iOS and Android only.

The App Store lists theScore Bet Sportsbook Casino at 4.8 out of 5 from roughly 221,000 ratings, on a listing that requires iOS 16 or later. Before you lean on that score, know that the same listing carried over from the ESPN Bet era, so it pools reviews from both brands instead of theScore Bet’s last few months alone.

Live streaming has one plain limit. Eligible sports exclude the NBA and MLB, a broadcast-rights outcome and not a product decision, and those two happen to be the highest-volume in-play leagues in the country. You need a positive cash balance to unlock a stream. A balance made up entirely of bonus bets won’t do it.

Cash out is offered on most single wagers and standard parlays, at theScore Bet’s discretion, priced off the unboosted, non-cashed-out payout. Taking it trades an uncertain outcome for a certain, worse one. Sometimes that’s the right call. Usually it isn’t.

Your account can also link to theScore’s separate news and scores app and carry your bets and favorite teams across both. Genuinely useful if you already used theScore for scores. A non-factor if you didn’t.

theScore Bet takes Visa and Mastercard credit cards for deposits and charges nothing of its own for them, a genuine surprise from a regulated sportsbook. Your card issuer may still treat the charge as a cash advance, with its fee and interest running from the moment it posts.

You have to upload a government-issued ID before you can even request a withdrawal, not during the request itself, and that step is the biggest speed lever you control. The minimum withdrawal is $10 on every method. Requests take up to 72 hours to process internally, then another one to three business days to land depending on where the money is going.

Among sportsbook deposit methods, one mismatch catches people out. Debit cards deposit on both Visa and Mastercard but withdraw on Visa only, and credit cards fund an account without being able to receive a payout at all. Fund on a Mastercard and get a bank transfer or a digital wallet on file before your first payout request.

PENN Play is what separates theScore Bet from an ordinary sportsbook loyalty scheme. It spans the sportsbook, the Hollywood Casino product and PENN’s physical casinos, so betting from your phone can turn into a comped hotel room or a cruise cabin at an actual property. No online-only book matches that. Enrollment is automatic at registration, with nothing to opt into separately.

The earn rates tell you what the program wants from you. Sports wagering earns one Tier Point for every $10 on a straight bet, and one Tier Point for every $5 on a parlay, so parlays earn points at double the rate per dollar. Look at what that rewards. The program pays fastest on the bet type carrying the widest hold, so chasing tier status faster means chasing the higher-margin product to get there.

theScore Bet states no conversion rate from Tier Points into spendable PENN Cash anywhere you can reach. What it does state is that $1 of PENN Cash equals $1 in the PENN Redeem Marketplace, which tells you nothing about how many Tier Points buy that dollar. A loyalty program you can’t convert into a dollar figure returns less than the tier chart makes it look, and that belongs out in the open.

A phone line exists for exactly two states, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, at 1 (844) 953-2121. Everywhere else gets live chat and email. Plan around it instead of holding it against the book, since most regulated sportsbooks run the same way.

theScore Bet lists no hours for chat, email or phone, so don’t count on round-the-clock coverage.

Live chat inside the app is your first stop for anything time-sensitive, like account access, a disputed settlement or a bet that graded wrong. Email at support@thescore.bet handles anything that needs documents attached.

Support has a ceiling, and licensing sits above it. Every state theScore Bet operates in runs a regulator complaint process that can compel an outcome customer service never could. That escalation path is what the word regulated is worth to you here.

You can set deposit, spend and loss limits, a maximum single wager and a daily time limit. The asymmetry between them matters more than the list. A tighter limit takes effect immediately. A looser one waits out a full period first. Trying a stricter limit costs you nothing, because you can tighten it again the moment it feels wrong.

Cool-off is the temporary option and reverses on its own timeline. Self-exclusion is the long one, and it doesn’t reverse on request once it’s set. On self-exclusion your open bets are canceled outright, your funds come back by check instead of to the original payment method, and pending promotions are forfeited. Durations vary meaningfully by state, confirmed against theScore Bet’s own current help documentation.

What it does well:

• A fast, well-built app carrying a 4.8-star rating across roughly 221,000 App Store reviews
• PENN Play’s tie-in to Hollywood Casino and PENN’s physical properties, which no online-only sportsbook can match
• Cash deposit and cash payout at a casino cage, a same-day option most regulated books can’t offer
• Mainline pricing that sits near the market on sides and totals
• Licensing you can verify on a state regulator’s own site in all 20 states
• A full desktop option, surprising anyone who assumed this was an app-only product

Where it falls short:

• The welcome offer excludes most of theScore Bet’s own existing customers by design
• Same Game Parlay switches off the moment a game starts
• Live streaming leaves out the NBA and MLB, its two highest-volume in-play sports
• Phone support covers two states out of 20
• Illinois bettors pay a $0.25 fee on every single wager
• Prop trees and alternate-line depth run thinner than at DraftKings and FanDuel

Two audiences fit. If you’re a migrated ESPN Bet customer who wants continuity and already uses theScore’s media app, this works. The same goes if you bet sides, totals and parlays and value a clean app over an exhaustive one, or if you visit a PENN or Hollywood property with any regularity. It suits a bonus hunter far less, since the current offer is shut to returning customers, and it suits a prop-heavy or alternate-lines bettor and an in-play grinder chasing NBA or MLB video even less.

Most people aren’t ranking all four books against each other. You’re deciding whether theScore Bet earns a place next to whatever app is already on your phone, so here is what it adds against each of them.

None of that says theScore Bet’s odds beat anyone else’s. You can shop a specific price on a specific bet at any time, and every state on theScore Bet’s list licenses several competing sportsbooks, so you’re never stuck with whatever number is on screen.

Our DraftKings review and our FanDuel review both cover deeper prop trees than theScore Bet carries, so the case for theScore Bet against either of them is app quality and the PENN Play property tie-in. Our Caesars review covers a Rewards program that pays its richest rate near a physical casino, so the case for theScore Bet there is a footprint that works the same way in all 20 states instead of concentrating value near Las Vegas.

Check your own state first. theScore Bet takes bets in 20 of them right now, and a migrated ESPN Bet account behaves exactly as it did before, under a new name and the same underlying license.

Treat the Bet Reset as unavailable if your account predates the eligibility cutoff under either brand name. Judge theScore Bet on pricing, the app and PENN Play instead, because that’s the product in your hand whatever the marketing puts on the banner.

Price and market depth both sit mid-pack next to the two market leaders. theScore Bet’s case is the app, the property loyalty tie-in and the desktop option, not the sharpest number available on any given game. If that sharpest number is the thing you’re after, keep a second book open alongside it.