Canton has had plenty to cheer about this fall, with the Tigers rolling into region play unbeaten after an open week. Football season is also when the sports betting commercials come thickest, and one of the names in them has changed. ESPN Bet stopped taking wagers on December 1, 2025, and the app that replaced it now goes by theScore Bet, run by the same parent company, Penn Entertainment.
The pitch on TV is simple enough: place your first bet, and if it loses, you get your money back up to $1,000. Anyone who goes looking for a theScore Bet promo code will find the current terms spelled out, and they reward slow reading, because the fine print changes what that $1,000 really is. For readers here in Madison County, there is also a bigger catch the ads never mention.
What the offer actually gives you
theScore calls its welcome deal Bet Reset. A new customer deposits at least $10 and places a first wager. If that wager wins, you keep the winnings and the promotion is finished. If it loses, the sportsbook refunds the stake, up to $1,000, but not as cash. The refund comes back as five separate bonus bets, each worth 20% of the original wager. Lose $200 on that first bet and you get five $40 bonus bets.
Bonus bets are not money in the bank. You can't withdraw them. When one wins, you collect only the winnings, not the bonus amount itself, so a $40 bonus bet at +100 odds pays out $40 in cash rather than $80. According to theScore's own promotion terms, the bonus bets land within 72 hours of the losing wager and expire seven days after they arrive. Miss that window and they disappear.
So a "$1,000 refund" is really five chances to win back some portion of a lost bet, inside one week. That is a long way from a check in the mail.
Questions to ask before you sign up
A reporter checking a claim before printing it would want answers to a handful of plain questions first:
- Am I physically standing in a state where this app is legal? (More on that below, and it matters more than anything else here.)
- Am I old enough? The minimum age is 21 in most states where theScore operates, including Louisiana and Tennessee.
- Am I comfortable handing over my full name, date of birth, home address and Social Security number? Licensed books ask for all of it to confirm identity.
- Would I spend this deposit on an evening out anyway, if the bonus never existed?
That last one is the most honest test. A promotion built around refunding a losing bet works best for the sportsbook when people bet more than they planned in order to "use" it.
Where Mississippi fits in the bigger picture
Here is the part national advertising skips. Mississippi has allowed sports betting since August 2018, but only at its licensed casinos. A few casino apps work on the property itself, yet there is no statewide mobile betting, and theScore Bet does not operate in Mississippi at all. Its app is live in 20 states plus Washington, D.C., and the location check it runs on every wager will block a bet placed from Canton.
The closest places it works are next door. Louisiana and Tennessee both host theScore Bet, so a Canton resident would have to be physically across the state line, a little over an hour west over the river bridge at Vicksburg, before a single wager counts. Any app that offers you a bonus from your living room here, without checking where you are, is not a licensed American sportsbook. Treat that as a red flag, not a loophole.
Lawmakers in Jackson keep arguing over whether the rules should change. The House passed the Mississippi Mobile Sports Wagering Act 100 to 11 this year, but as the Magnolia Tribune reported in March, it died in the Senate Gaming Committee, the same place earlier versions stalled. Committee chairman Sen. David Blount of Jackson objected to a tax cut for brick and mortar casinos packaged into the bill, and he told the Clarion Ledger he worried about "the negative consequences to putting a casino in everybody's pocket." The House sponsor, Rep. Casey Eure of Saucier, has made mobile betting his signature issue, and the next session opens in January.
The short answer for Canton
For most readers here, the straight answer to "should I claim it?" is that you can't, at least not from the couch on a Friday night while the Tigers are playing. If a trip to New Orleans or Memphis puts you in range and you decide to try it, set a spending limit before the first bet and check the expiry date on every bonus bet the day it lands. Think of the whole thing as the cost of an evening's entertainment. It is not a way to make money back, and the ads are not going to remind you of that.
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