A balanced strategy is not based on “one hand,” a balanced strategy is employed over the coarse of many hands and it’s strength as a strategy is only realized over the coarse of many hands.

What i am struggling to understand is this: every hand of poker is an isolated and unique event. A balanced strat may dictate that: based on X board texture, Y betting action, Z range etc that we taylor our range to V-bet this river half the time (this is just a miscellaneous scenario), but hero is unlikely to find him/her self in this scenario again at least for a while. This situation is unique, and the next hand will also be unique, and the one after that, etc. How is hero soposed to create balance when each hand requires a different kind of balance? Am i completely misunderstanding how to implement balance?

In a lot of Phil galfold RIO videos I see him say stuff like “okay I’ve been showing up with a lot of made hands, my perceived range is strong so I’m going to add in some bluffs and represent more value since my opponent will give me credit”. Is this sort of ‘feel’ approach the only real way to create balance because doing it by the math across many hands is so complex? How do great players implement balance in real time?

Your betting range in any hand will usually have some semblance of (and sometimes a great deal of) balance. e.g. You'll have some value hands that want to get called, and you'll have some bluffs that want to elicit folds. It's just you can't put a specific percentage or ratio on it, because each spot has its own solution.

I'm not really sure what your specific aim is (or if there even is one) with the recent posts about balance. You might do better to think about (or post) a situation/board and consider which parts of your range would make for sensible value-bets and bluffs. From that you can get an idea of how weighted towards value or bluffs you might be. Then you can pick a different board and think about what your range looks like on that one. By building ranges on a couple of boards, you'll learn a few things that are useful in many situations.
For example, you could pick a simple BTN vs BB spot where you are on the BTN and the flop comes AK3hh. Consider things like how often villain is likely to fold to a c-bet (if he folds a lot, you can bet more air), which hands will make the best multi-street value-bets, which hands/draws could be double- or triple-barreled, which hands prefer smaller pots (so should be checked back on the flop). Think about which turn cards will alter the board the most etc etc. A "good" c-betting strategy on that board will be "balanced", because it will be a mixture of strong hands and weak ones. It's up to you decide where you draw the line at "strong enough to v-bet", or "not strong enough to v-bet", and "Good bluffing candidate", "bad bluffing candidate" etc. When you build the range, there will be lots of combos that you're not sure about, but you can put them into the betting or checking brackets according to how unbalanced your range looks when you've categorized the obvious v-bets and bluffs.

I don't know if this will help at all, but I'll give a couple of examples of imbalance that are strategically useful.
Player 1 is an ubernit. He only plays TT+/AK and hardly ever bluffs. On a board like JT4, his entire range has "something". In fact, his range is super strong, because he has 6 combos of sets (JJ/TT), 18 combos of overpairs (QQ+), and the worst hand in his range is the 16 combos of AK that have 2 overs and a gutshot to the nuts. He could bet his entire range, because he has 24 value combos and only 16 combos of unmade hands, but even those are drawing to the nuts. In short, he's never airballing.

Player 2 is a loose aggressive Friday night fun player. Let's suppose he plays a 22% range of 22+, A2s+, K9s+, QTs+, JTs, T9s, 98s, 87s, 76s, 65s, ATo+, KTo+, QTo+, JTo. On that JT4 flop, he can have the same overpairs and sets as the nit, along with a set of fours and some top two pairs, but he also has a ton of air, like 65s or A3s. He can't c-bet at a high frequency and make money, because the value part of his range is only a small proportion of it. To have a balanced c-betting strat, he'd have to bet top pair or better, and then use all his straight draws and maybe even some BDFDs, but all his underpairs and total misses would have to be check-folded. If he fired a c-bet at 100% frequency he'd be unbalanced, because he'd be betting too much air and not enough value. You'd give this bluffy LAG much less respect than the value-heavy nit.

Both of the above unbalanced players are reasonably easy to play against. You give the nit a lot of credit and you fold a lot, because he never has air, but you shouldn't fold to to the spewy LAG, because he's unbalanced in favour of bluffs. In short, the nit "always has it", but the LAG "never has it".
A much tougher opponent is one that is more balanced, such that he might have it, or he might not. He's unreadable, because he has just the right amount of value hands, and just the right amount of bluffs. Exactly what that "right amount" (as a number) is impossible for me to say without using a solver, and it will also vary from situation to situation, but a "good" range is one that allows the bettor to bet a lot of bluffs profitably, because he also has lots of value.

Let's be outrageous and assume that we know the Nash equilibrium preflop raising and calling ranges for this example:

3 handed no limit holdem 100 bb effective:

I raise 3x on the button, small blind folds, big blind calls.

flop T95r

big blind checks and it's on me.

I have three immediate options:

a) bet
b) check
c) bet or check at frequency

If betting is more profitable than checking with a specific hand, I should bet that hand 100% of the time.

If checking is more profitable than betting, I should check that hand 100% of the time.

If betting and checking both allow me to capture the exact same fraction of the pot, then I should bet or check at frequency.

With that in mind, let's go back to a piece from the original post:

Even if I only played this one hand of poker for the rest of my life, the delegation of hands into the groups above (a,b,c) will be exactly the same as if I planned to play a large number of hands. When playing a singular hand, the opponent still does not know what I have; the opponent must construct a counter strategy that guarantees a minimum ev of zero vs my entire strategy as a whole, which takes into consideration every hand in my range and every line I will take with every hand in my range. This necessity of guaranteeing a minimum ev of zero is at the heart of the definition of the Nash equilibrium.

The hands in my strategy that bet 100% or check 100% are easier to visualize as maximizing ev than those hands that bet or check at frequency. The hands that bet or check at frequency however are most certainly maximizing ev; it's just harder to visualize because the margins are not defined in our minds. Our minds like to put hands into nice neat categories that we can manage easily.

Here are the possibilities:

I think that in the modern poker environment, we should hope to play (c) most of the time, (b) by mistake occasionally, and (a) by mistake rarely.

Thanks a lot for this post arty.

I would not think about the game in this way.

The EV difference (otherwise might be called "skill" difference) between two players is the summation and difference of all possibilities for that subtree minus whatever rake may be included. By possibilities, I'm strictly referencing each player's strategy for each hand vs. each hand and whatever possible reaction at whatever frequency the player is utilizing.

Would you think there is a way to de-unique-ify situations because that would solve your problem right?

Let say the board is JT2. How different is that board compared to JT3? How different is that board from T93?

Let's do the same with the turn now. Is there "groups" of turns?

First group: JT2A, JT2K
Second group: JT2Q, JT29, JT28, JT27
Third group: JT23, JT24, JT25
Fourth group: JT2T, JT22, JT2J

Maybe one can disagree with the way I made the groups here but it doesn't matter, the point is that your play will probably be different according to the various groups, not the various hands!

Also note that the first group is quite a rare situation. The second group is quite common, the third one is even more common and the fourth is quite rare.

As a side note, if you want to play more balanced, I'd advise you to try and beat the bad nit player. The bad nit player only bets for value. The thing with beating the bad nit is that you are beating the most difficult of the terribly-unbalanced players and that will teaches you a lot about being balanced.

It's easy to beat the unbalanced "fish" because he bluffs all the time. So when you find out how to beat those, that teaches you how unbalanced is bad on that end of the spectrum. But now, you need to beat the other end of the spectrum, the unbalanced "for value". Once you beat both end of the spectrum, well, you'll know how to be decently balanced: dont do like the fish or the bad nit.

My point being that if you can't beat the "all for value" player, then you don't know why shouldn't play yourself "only for value". Do you know why you shouldn't play only for value? Then you beat the bad nits? See my reasoning, you only know why you shouldn't play only for value the day you beat bad nits.

Note that most low limits game are full of bad nits and they will call you "fish" the day you beat them.