wyman, on 2011-October-01, 23:39, said:
Sorry. My point is that if you play 4m as a cue in spades, opener gets jammed into 4S with a lot of hands (pretty much all where he can't bid 3N, in fact), after which you'll have a hard time finding 6D when it's right.
Okay, I suppose there will be hands with Hx in spades and no heart stopper that will guess to bid 4S instead of 3NT. But I think most hands with xx in spades and no stopper will just bid 3NT anyway. Or did 3S deny a stopper for you? Standard Lebensohl as I know it uses 2N..3S as invitational and 3S direct as forcing. If 3S did deny a heart stopper, then definitely you'd play 4m as natural.
Assuming 3S says nothing about a
♥ stopper, I don't think I'd bid anything other than 3NT or 4S as opener very often. The comment by ggwhiz about responder bidding 6D over 4S is pretty good: you could even find partner with just Hx in spades but a better diamond fit sometimes.
Surely it isn't optimal just to bid 3NT or 4S all the time. I still don't want to bypass 3NT with
♠xx
♥xxx, but there's room to distinguish a normal 3-4 card raise, a great 3-4 card raise, and hands with Hx. You could play something artificial allowing you to show all three of these, or maybe just agree that 4m is natural suggesting
♠Hx (since you wouldn't bypass 3NT with
♠xx usually). I don't like cuebidding here since we're the limited hand, but one artificial bid suggesting slam positive values with a spade fit could be worthwhile if you're going to go the artificial route and reserve one bid for these. (Really I wouldn't want to agree to anything artificial here since it wouldn't come up often enough.)