Ok, a little more detail.

A8o is the midpoint for aces. You dominate A2-A7, you lose to A9-AK. Thus you dominate slightly more hands than dominate you. The more people in the pot, the more likely someone dominates you. You'd think someone with AJ+ would raise preflop, but many weak players always limp them.

Next we have to look at the 8. Clearly domination isn't an issue, but with this many players in the pot a pair of 8's isn't likely to win.

So you've got 2 cards. One that's only OK due to your weak kicker, and one that's poor. On balance, that's a fold.

In general, but particularly with any multiway hand (and even with a raise you're looking at proabably 4 people), you really want hands that can win at least 2 of 3 ways, and here I'm stealing this from SSH or ToP or some such. The more multiway the less #1 matters and more that 2/3 matter, vice versa for HU.

1) Big card value
2) flush value
3) straight value

A8o has reasonable big card value and little else, so it's a pretty easy fold for me in this situation. Hands like AJo+ start to have big card value for both cards, which counts for a lot despite the fact the straight possibilities are more limited than something like JT.

Again, analysis props go to one of the many poker theory books, not myself [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]