I'm questioning my logic and strat;

Most of the regular posters that I hold in the highest esteeme seem to stress having a ballanced range MUCH more than I do. It could be that discussin on the topic of ballance is generally in regard to GTO concepts and/or illustrative in nature rather than literal or practical. Or it could be something that i'm just not getting.

I try to play a reactive game and think more in terms of adjusting to exploit than to attempt to play as close to GTO as possible.

I rarely go out of my way to ballance my range unless a number of my hands have been shown down. Even then I am more likely to adjust based on my table image than to try to play a more ballanced, less exploitable game.
There are exceptions that do make sense to me;
multi-tabling to the point where your focus is spread thin and you might do best to just try to "let the money come to you" and play as near GTO as you can
Playing against the same group of players frequently(even here it might be better to change gears based on the way others are playing "tonight"
Programming a bot
Playing in a game where many hands are going to showdown (yours included)
Playing against a very good player who is also trying to play GTO, unlikely to make many mistakes, and able to mix it up when he needs to.

But, generally speaking, it makes little sense to me to go so far out of your way to ballance hand ranges as advocated by the seemingly brightest posters. Do we need to ballance against players who make mistakes in on direction or another, rather than balance i try to exploit. And i'm not talking about fish only, just human players who make some (non zero) number of exploitable mistakes. Maybe this is just two different ways to approach the game. Or is the whole talk of ballance more of a way to get points across and explain concepts than actual practical advice?

Would players who stress ballance in ranges actually take "line A" just because they already played this hand and they took line B? Or is it a given that we only ballance based on what our opponents have SEEN us do with hands that have been shown down?

Example; I'm playing a $20 HU SnG (blinds 10-20) T1500 each.
in hand one (against unknown opponent)
Button:villain: raises to 60
BB; ME: flat call
Flop; KsQs2d
I x, Button bets 80, I call
turn; Ad
I x, and villain x's back
river is the 2 of clubs
I x and villain bets 180, I raise to 500, villain folds.
Villain doesn't know if i flopped a pair or set, or two pair, or draw, or combo draw. He doesn't know if i had made my straight on the turn or if i missed a flush draw on the turn and river. Maybe I had a set that improved to FH. Maybe I had total air and it looked like a good time to make a move since he x'd the turn when the ace hit?
So let's say that I did, in fact, miss a draw with Ts9s (i'm very unlikely to have that hand in that spot readless but that's not the point)

Now am I supposed to take that line with legit hands moving forward if they come up again? Why? he has no idea what i had. I would actually be more inclined to do the opposite. I would make a note that he folded after putting in a bet on the flop and the river, then I would try NOT to take a similar line in the future if i actually did make a big hand on the flop or turn (I want more than two bets with my monsters) and, on the contrary, if a similar spot came up and maybe I had a hand like QJ on that same board I would be inclined to run the same exact play. x/c the flop, x the turn, and if it was x'd back I would strongly consider Xing and raising as a bluff. And all that seems to be the opposite of ballancing.

I'm likely just missing something because the people who post a lot about balanced ranges tend to be far and away the most knowledgeble players in my experience the people stressing ballance seem to be, far and away, the most knowledgeble. At least that's my impression.
So what am I missing?

This is the theory forum, and as such we usually consider the game-theoretic nature of the game. For playing well in a game-theoretic sense, we need balance. Even if we're exploiting the opponent, we still need balance (DUCY?).

If you're talking about the practice of playing poker against a particular player pool with particular stakes, there are many situations where balance is marginally important, or totally unimportant. In particular, balance is only important if you play many hands against the same players.

Do note that what we often call "balance" is shorthand or a slight misnomer for another phenomenon: minmaxing using mixed strategies. When we have very little info on villain then we want to play a strategy that will do reasonably well no matter what villain's strategy is. The strategy that we use (which we hope is similar to GTO, possibly with some alternations according to the player pool) must exhibit signs of balance naturally, since a GTO strategy is naturally balanced: if it were unbalanced, then some strategy of villain could exploit us. In other words, an unexploitable strategy is inherently balanced, so balancedness is good to discuss even when we don't play against villains many hands, but if we know so little about them that we have to try to play some kind of GTO.

One more note: you say that if hands don't get to showdown then villain doesn't get info on our play so we don't need balance, but that's not true, at least theoretically speaking: villain does get statistical information about our play. As an easy example: if we cbet too much then villain knows he can bluff-raise us even without ever getting to showdown with us.

Seems like your confusing balance with taking different lines with the same hand in the same spot. We can take the exact same line with certain hands our whole career; because we should have a good ratio of bluffs and value, and hopefully have a wide range of hands as well.

thanks guys, your answers where very helpful. I was probably confusing balance with taking same line with same hand to some degree. And it seems like i was on the right track thinking that talk about balance is often more of an excersize in game theory than practical advice about a specific situation.
But I was actually running into a lot of talk about balance in HU discussion and others not in this forum. I just thought it would be more appropriate to ask this question on this than the HU forum.

Thanks.

And yes, i see the info you give statistically. I took a long road to this question that actually began with questioning the vallidity of MRing Bttn 100% in HU cash game play. I'm going to ask the question to you guys in the theory forum and see if you agree, disagree, or have some thoughts to add.
Thnx