I have an even worse story that doesn't involve betting. This is TRUE. It happened in college.
A friend of mine is big into day trading stocks and whatnot....at least he used to be. One day...about 5 years ago, he comes across these penny stocks for a mining company that had just bought a bunch of land in Brazil I think. At that point you could buy 1,000 for a penny. At that point none of us belonged to any of those security trading sites, and we needed $800 minumum to invest to be able to join. Well being in college there was no way in hell we were able to come up with $800. And we needed it that night b/c the stocks went on sale the next morning. After about a month of testing the soil for the optimum minerals and whatnot for solid potential of diamonds being there, they found that the soil was of high quality for diamond production. The shares went from 1/1000 of a penny to around .06 cents per share. That comes to roughly 4.8 million dollars per our $800. It kept going up for a good week or so to top out at around .17 cents per share, that comes to $13.6 million. If we had the starting $800 to invest we could both be multi-millionaires as I type this.
F*ck me....