I did experiment FYI. I wasted an hour or more because I assumed you needed a colon
after the IP or domain name. That one mistake really makes things confusing.

When I removed the colon and included -r and -m it seemed I was getting further away.

Again you showed very clear concrete examples. Those examples are nowhere in the man
page. The manpage is confusing and I stand by my intial statements. 

Your examples show -m and -r 

When I used them on the same line I still had errors.

The man page shows a bunch of other flags which is the first step to making things
confusing. -abdRUGM

[ -- ssh-options ] [user@host | -c cmdline | -p

Normally that would be the best example and yet again I went down the wrong 
direction.

Sorry for the disturbance