Well that didn't take long... RM bunker maintenance in the states.

[Alex Miller]

This afternoon I played at a muni in L.A. and to my surprise the bunkers were maintained (or attempted anyway) in the style we saw at Royal Melbourne. I guess the super was watching the presidents cup.

This was definitely a concerted effort as the faces were packed tighter and only the bottom was raked, a marked difference from the last time I played this course 2 months ago. I thought they played very well, and if plugged lies weren't eliminated completely, they were much rarer than before.

Is this something that will catch on here state-side? This was the last place I expected to see a bunker maintained like this.

[Anthony_Nysse]

Negative...There was no effort to rake the faces, just smooth out the floors. I'm sure that staff (2-3 people) were used elsewhere, or they just didnt have staff. There may have been rain or irrigation recently to remove any rake lines in the faces.
  East Lake actually did do a "RM" bunker technique for the Tour Championship, raking just the floors and using the back side of the bunker rakes to smooth the faces.

[Scott Stearns]

sounds really expensive.

[Alan FitzGerald CGCS MG]

Anthonys correct, thats not an attempt at Royal Melbournes bunker raking. Simply its a bunker that was raked with a Sandpro and they didn't have the staff/time to get the edges.

I believe the concept behind the way they were raked at RM is the smooth raked faces get hard so in theory balls will roll to the bottoms and since they are hard don't require as much raking, therefore it saves time as the only area that needs regular attention are the floors where the balls end up.

I get the concept, but I'm not too sure about labor savings (from only having to regularly touch up the floors) in practice as I've played a course that had done this years back and the issue was where balls hit and 'broke' the faces, they looked bad and inevitably golfers will walk down faces 'breaking' them also. The issue is that since the faces have become hard they are difficult to quickly rake up as the sand is clumpy/crusty so hard to move around. Obviously this isn't an issue for a tournament with the numerous volunteers they have to help out and it does look great though