I don't know where he was going either, but both of our examples are good ways to show that while numbers don't lie, what we do with them may be misleading to some, or at least counter-intuitive. Just because some people are fooled doesn't mean that there is any intent to deceive.By choosing to reduce each group of 10 by 3, you chose the pattern that resulted in the highest number of combinations. By reducing only 1 group of 10 by all 9, I chose the one with the fewest combinations. I don't know about you, but my example was simply to show that changing how the numbers are selected changes the number of combinations.
I suspect that most people imagine that there's some relatively simple correlation between the size of the number pool and the number of possible combinations that can be made from those numbers, and that your example of reducing the field by 30% really resulted in "missing" combinations when there were less than 70% as many. Of course, the reality is that it's far more complex than simple linear or geometric progressions. Whether you're dealing with the comparatively simple example of pick 3, or (n of x), reducing the pool by 30% reduces the possible combinations by more than 30%, and different methods of reducing the pool will result in different reductions in the possible combinations. The reduction in the size of the pool and the redcution in the possible combinations are two different things. I alluded to the comparison of apples and oranges, but it's your example that was comparing apples and oranges.
I definitely have't tried to deceive anybody about the odds for MM or how those odds work. If you thought otherwise you've completely misunderstood what I've said, which is only that the effect that buying more chances has on your odds in MM or other games of chance is a simple direct correlation. Not only have I never suggested that buying 10, 20,or 100 tickets gives you a decent chance of winning, I've often pointed out that even with huge numbers of tickets your chances are still slim to none. Since it's a direct linear correlation, buy twice as many tickets and your chances of winning are twice as "good" as they were. Buy 10 times as many and your chances are 10 times as good. Buy 16.77773 times as many tickets and your chances of winning are 16.77773 times as good. The fact that some people don't understand how it works doesn't change the fact that it is indeed a simple linear correlation.
I'm sure that everybody believes that if we find two boxes that each have 100 apples in them, and I take 10 from one box and you take 20 from the other box that you've taken twice as many as I have. You'll have 100% more aples than I have, but the box you took them from will still have 80/90th's or 88.88% as much as my box. It's exactly the same with taking chances from the combinations that are available in the lottery. As near as I can tell, a lot of people don't understand that the chances of winning and the chances of losing are different things that follow different progression, just like how many apples you have compared to me, and how many are left in your box compared to mine. Whether the chances of winning the lottery are expressed as 1 in 87,855 or 0.0014%, it's the same thing. If some people think one of those numbers looks better than the other, it has nothing to do with anything I've ever said.