In this study we employ the attach-pull-release (APR) methodology, using the pAPRika toolkit , for the SAMPL8 hostguest blind challenge to predict absolute binding free energies as reference (described in detail in section 2.4). We selected this approach because it has been used with considerable success to study host-guest binding in several host-guest systems previously, and provides relatively high throughput binding free energy calculations in our hands. We also evaluate the performance of other methodologies submitted by participants from various academic institutions and/or industry. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: We provide a general description of the types of methods submitted for this challenge, give detail on the method(s) used for reference calculations, and finally go through the results, lessons learned, and conclusions.