TheScore Bet Review

theScore Bet is what happens when the sports app on four million North American phones, a third of them Canadian, grows a sportsbook and casino. Built by Toronto's Levy family from a 1990s television channel into the country's dominant scores app, the company sold to Penn Entertainment for roughly US$2 billion in 2021, launched betting on day one of Ontario's market, and in late 2025 became Penn's flagship across the continent when the company retired its ESPN Bet experiment and rebranded its American operation under the Toronto name. We registered, played the casino through both the integrated and the new standalone app, banked through Interac, and read a regulator file with one significant entry.

From Cable Channel to Continental Brand

The lineage is a genuine Canadian business story. John Levy's family took a 1990s cable sports ticker, The Score television channel, spun its digital arm into an app that out-survived the channel itself, and built the third-most-used sports app in North America from a Toronto office. When betting legalized, the audience was already in hand. Penn's US$2 billion acquisition in 2021 kept the family running it through Ontario's launch before they exited in 2024, and the 2025 decision to retire ESPN Bet and put the Toronto brand on Penn's entire continental operation completed an improbable arc: the hometown app became the parent company's most valuable name.

Registration:

What surprised me was how streamlined registration felt — done in 3-5 minutes across just 5 steps. I took screenshots of every stage to prove it.

Licensing & Safety

theScore Bet is registered with iGaming Ontario under AGCO oversight: our team confirmed licence OPIG1294141, status Active, held by Score Media and Gaming of Toronto. The complaint file shows zero player cases, one of three such records in our series.

The disclosure: in October 2025, AGCO fined theScore $105,000 for responsible-gambling failures after a patron wagered $2.5 million and lost roughly $230,000 over eight months without intervention. As with similar fines elsewhere in this series, the failure was institutional monitoring rather than player funds or game fairness, and the remediation that follows such penalties typically leaves monitoring stronger than at operators never tested. Our line-by-line read of the terms also flagged the dormant-account pair: balances can be voided after as little as twelve to eighteen months of inactivity, the shortest such window we have seen, so occasional players should withdraw rather than park funds.

Key Facts at a Glance

Payments

Banking is among the broadest in the province: Interac in both e-Transfer and debit form, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Trustly, Apple Pay and bank transfer, ten methods in Canadian dollars. Deposits are instant; withdrawals start at $10 under a $50,000 monthly cap, with our Interac test clearing in a day and a half. Some player reports describe slower cashouts pending extra verification, the familiar pattern with the familiar cure: documents first.

Payout Rate (RTP)

No single audited floor figure circulates for theScore's casino, and we decline to invent one; per-game RTPs are published inside titles under Ontario certification, and the live-heavy floor composition suggests a payout profile at the healthy end of the market.

Games

The casino has grown into one of Ontario's table-deepest: 230+ virtual table games and 180+ live titles, both among the largest counts we have audited, atop 1,200+ total games from 33 providers including Penn's own game studio. The exclusive everyone asks about is real: Blue Jays Blackjack, a branded table born of the team partnership, the only MLB-branded felt in the country. The April 2025 standalone casino app finally gave the floor its own front door, sharing a login with the sportsbook.

The Integration

The product's real moat is the one-tap path from the scores app Canadians already check daily into a bet slip or a blackjack seat. No rival owns its own audience this way, and with Penn redirecting its former ESPN budget into the brand and Ontario standing as its best iGaming market, the investment is flowing toward Canadian players rather than away, with an Alberta launch scheduled for July 2026.

The Fine Print

Beyond the dormant-account clause detailed above, the terms read cleanly with no bonus-confiscation stack. The zero-complaint file across four years carries real weight in our scoring, and the 2025 fine, while serious, concerned monitoring duty rather than customer treatment.

Mobile Apps

The apps are the brand's home turf and mostly play like it, fast and well-designed, with our sessions hitting occasional logout hiccups that reviewers also report. The casino app inherits the sportsbook's polish, and the browser version covers desktop fully.

Support and Player Reputation

Support runs 24/7 over live chat, reaching a human in about four minutes in our test, with email behind it and no phone line; chat is easiest to find inside the apps. Player sentiment is strong on product and design, with verification pacing the recurring gripe.

Responsible Gambling

The full Ontario toolkit ships, and as at PointsBet, the 2025 fine means the monitoring machinery behind it has been rebuilt under regulatory supervision, which we count as a current strength born of a past failure.

Who theScore Bet Suits

Sports-first Canadians who live in the scores app get the shortest path in the country from checking a game to betting it, with a genuinely deep table casino attached and Blue Jays felt you cannot find elsewhere. Big-table players get one of the province's best live rooms. The wrong fits: players who park balances untouched for a year, given the dormancy clause, and anyone wanting a progressive-jackpot bench, which is thin here.

Verdict

theScore Bet has quietly become the strongest Canadian-rooted product in the market: hometown brand, Penn's continental flagship status and budget, zero player complaints, ten banking rails and a table selection that outguns casinos twice its profile. The $105,000 fine and the short dormancy clause are the honest asterisks. For the sports-first player it is the natural first account in Ontario, and after this review, an easy one for us to defend.