What Happened to ESPN Bet?

You didn’t have to do anything when the rebrand hit. theScore Bet‘s transition notice says login credentials, account funds, open wagers and account settings all moved across automatically, with no new registration and no second identity check.

What Carried Over

• Login credentials
• Wallet balance
• Open wagers
• Wagering history
• Account settings
• Responsible-gambling limits
• Loyalty balances and status (PENN Cash, PENN Play Credit and Tier Points)

One connection didn’t survive the move. The link between an ESPN Bet account and your ESPN account ended at the rebrand, and a link to theScore’s media app took its place.

How to Log Back In

Try your old ESPN Bet email and password first. Credentials weren’t reset, the app icon updated itself in place, and there’s nothing to reinstall. If the login still fails, email support@thescore.bet or open live chat inside the app, since no general US phone line exists outside Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

Before you assume the worst, check whether a deposit limit or a self-exclusion you set during the ESPN Bet years is still running. Those settings carried through the rebrand and are almost certainly still enforced. A live limit blocks far more logins than a lost account ever does.

Haven’t logged in since the rebrand? Do it now. The login works and the balance is intact. There’s no claim to file and nothing to wait on. Log in and look.

PENN Entertainment and ESPN mutually agreed to end their sportsbook partnership. Two dates get conflated in almost every retelling, so keep them apart. The termination was announced Nov. 6, 2025, and the shutdown took effect 25 days later, on Dec. 1, 2025.

The original agreement, signed in August 2023, ran on an initial 10-year term at $150 million a year in cash plus warrants, and it carried a mutual right for either side to walk after a stated year if market-share thresholds went unmet. That clause is why the ending reads contractual instead of sudden. Both companies built themselves an exit on day one. Nobody triggered a penalty later.

No regulator pulled a license and no insolvency was involved. Penn Sports Interactive, LLC held the state licenses under both brand names the whole way through, and that continuity is what let the handoff happen without a gap in coverage. Names and owners change inside a legal sports betting market all the time without the underlying license breaking. PENN moved the business to a brand it already owned, theScore, instead of letting it disappear.

The state question has no single clean answer. The old ESPN Bet-era footprint, theScore Bet’s current list and a state regulator’s own public list disagree with each other, and reading only one of the three leaves you with the wrong picture.

Washington, D.C. is the state that changed. theScore Bet closed its sportsbook there on Feb. 23, 2026, well after the rebrand. Wagers settling Feb. 25 through Mar. 27, 2026 graded as a win no matter what the actual result was. Anything still open after Mar. 27 was voided and refunded, and anything earlier graded normally. Balances stayed open throughout, and a D.C. bettor can still get down by crossing into Maryland, Virginia or West Virginia.

Missouri runs the other direction. Its market launched the same day as the rebrand, Dec. 1, 2025, so ESPN Bet never operated there at all. Search this brand from Missouri and you’re chasing a book that was never available to you.

New York gives the mismatch its clearest example. As of this writing, the New York State Gaming Commission, which licenses every sports betting app in the state, still lists “ESPN Bet” among them instead of theScore Bet, months after the rename took hold everywhere else.

Logging in and placing a bet follow different rules. You can log in, check a balance and withdraw from anywhere in the United States. Only the wager itself requires you to be standing inside one of the states below, and that matters most if you’ve moved since 2025.

If you ever had an ESPN Bet account, you don’t qualify for theScore Bet’s current welcome offer. Eligibility is written around the company holding the account, never the brand name on the app the day you opened it, so every migrated account gets caught no matter how long ago you funded it.

The live offer is a $1,000 Bet Reset. Place a first cash wager, and if it loses, the stake comes back as bonus bets, up to $1,000. The eligibility terms exclude anyone who previously registered and deposited on a Penn Sports Interactive product before the offer’s stated cutoff, and an ESPN Bet account is a Penn Sports Interactive product by definition. Opening a second account won’t get you around it, because the exclusion follows the person and not the brand on the login screen.

One structural detail matters even if you can’t claim a dollar of it. The reward doesn’t arrive as one credit. It lands as several smaller bonus bets, generally within 72 hours of the qualifying loss, and expires roughly a week later. Regulated books build them that way on purpose. Splitting a reward into time-limited pieces cuts how much of the advertised total most customers ever use.

Any promo code attached to the name ESPN Bet is dead on arrival. Nothing is left to claim under that name, code or no code.

Your old account is still live, so the banking rules that apply to it are theScore Bet’s current rules.

Credit cards fund the account in most states, though not all of them. theScore Bet takes no credit card deposit at all in New York. In Iowa, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Illinois and Virginia, card-funded money from anywhere turns into a restricted balance the moment you use the account inside that state. You can’t wager restricted funds there, but they stay withdrawable and go usable again once you’re back in a permitting state.

What a method deposits and what it withdraws don’t always match. Debit cards deposit on Visa or Mastercard but pay out on Visa only, and gift or prepaid cards get refused either way. If you funded on a Mastercard, put a bank transfer or a wallet on file before you request a first payout.

Withdrawal requests get processed within about 72 hours internally, then take one to three more business days depending on the method. Call it a week, not an afternoon. Uploading a government ID ahead of the request, instead of at the moment you make it, removes the longest part of that delay.

The spread runs wider than most regulated books offer, though the fine print does more damage than the logo count ever will.

Pricing and market depth come from the risk desk running theScore Bet now. ESPN’s branding never set a single line.

A few markets carry state-specific restrictions, college player props in certain states among them, and none of that traces back to the old brand name. State law decides it.

The app on your phone is the same app record, updated in place. Nobody had to download anything new. If you still have the old ESPN Bet icon saved, tapping it opens theScore Bet’s branding, and the underlying app listing kept its original release date.

The ESPN account link is gone for good, and so is any bet tracking that lived inside ESPN’s app. Nothing restores that specific integration. theScore’s media app link does a similar job from a different app entirely.

The useful part stayed put. Wallet, full bet history and the settings menu all carried over and work exactly as they did under the old name.

If a star rating comes up in conversation, treat it carefully. Any current app-store score pools reviews written during the ESPN Bet years with everything written since the rebrand, so it reads as a verdict on two different sportsbooks at once.

It isn’t, and the accounting says so louder than anything else. PENN booked an $825.0 million impairment against the Interactive segment tied to this business in the same period the deal ended, and a write-down that size doesn’t reverse itself by relaunching a name.

The exit was mutual and contractual, never a failure waiting to be patched. Both companies agreed to those terms in 2023, both used the option they had built in, and PENN’s more recent results show continued investment going into theScore’s own brand.

The ESPN name surviving on television is a separate business from the sportsbook and signals nothing about a return. ESPN licenses that name for content these days, and wagering isn’t part of the arrangement.

One theory still circulating says a scandal or a regulatory action forced the closure. Neither company’s public filings support it. What both said on the record was about market share. Misconduct never entered it.

Deposit limits and self-exclusions you set during the ESPN Bet years carried through the rebrand and are still enforced under the current name. A new name on the login screen hands nobody a clean slate. Assume a limit you set in 2024 is live until you check it.

You’ll find your current limits inside the app under its responsible-gambling settings, where deposit, time and wager limits are all listed and adjustable.

Self-exclusion terms differ by state, sometimes in the years offered, sometimes in the paperwork it takes to enroll, so no single number below applies everywhere.

1. ESPN Bet shut down on Dec. 1, 2025 and became theScore Bet under the same company and the same state licenses, so the name change itself never put your money at risk.
2. Nothing is available to sign up for or claim under the ESPN Bet name, from anyone, ever. Treat any promo code or offer using that name as dead.
3. Log in with your old credentials and check the account, then read the theScore Bet review before you bet with it again.

That’s the whole answer. The account is intact, the brand is gone, and the money was never the part that broke.