[Question] Not initialized asm var

[backtrack1]

Hey everyone,
I'm trying to learn reversing with IDA and some other tools, and a got some simple "hackme.exe", which are simple programs with an "username" and "password" field i had to solve.

I got crackme-1.rar from https://sites.google.com/site/hacking1now/crackmes and after disassembling it i understand the asm code quite well, except that there is one problem:

I got a not initialized variable, and i don't know how to handle it (or if i misread something)

Here is a picture of the relevant source code:

There is no previous occurrence of "var_8" (not even with an hard-coded %ebp+$offset or smth) and in the bottom left box, "some" value is load in %eax, depending on what was at this address before, because afair asm does not initialize variables automatically with "zero".

can someone give me a hint or tell me what I'm doing wrong?

thanks

[Aftiagouras]

lea eax, [ebp+var_8] only loads a pointer to var_8 into eax, not its current value.