iOS 10 play a Smart Playlist on iPhone
It seems we are talking here about possibility of creating/transferring Smart Playlists from iTunes for Mac to iPhone.

There was such a possibility back in the days, it flawlessly worked with old iPod Nano in the old iTunes, according to the apple discussions. You could configure complicated filters based on given starts for the tracks, genres, years, etc. and to generate the Smart Playlists, which allowed to play the same music with the specific order on your devices.

I checked my settings (the latest iOS and OS Sierra) - and I still have the smart playlists, so Apple haven't removed the possibility of using them. Smart playlists are present in their documentation as well. So it means it should work out of the box.

You have to make sure, you turned on the music and playlists synchronization in your iTunes:


Select the Music tab in the left panel of iTunes. 
Click Sync Music at the top of the iTunes screen in order to sync music to your iPhone.
Click the button next to Entire Music Library to sync all your iTunes music to your iPhone (Please, note, this only works if your phone's storage is bigger than your library. If it isn't, you'll get some of your music but not all of it.)
Click the button next to Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres to specify which music is downloaded to your iPhone. Sync playlists by checking the boxes in the Playlist section or all music by specific artists by checking the boxes in the Artists section. Sync all music in a particular genre or from a given album by clicking the boxes in the Genres and Albums sections.