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The Queenstown stop of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, sponsored by PokerStars.net, was host to its final starting flight yesterday. Despite tournament organizers’ claims that Day 1c would contain the largest competitor field of all three starting days, only 43 players paid their buy-ins. In a fortunate turn of events for the entire tournament roster, seven players failed to show up entirely, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the already sizable prize pool.

As with the first two starting days, Day 1c consisted of six levels of play. A total of 71 players will take to the felt on Day 2, with 20, 28 and 23 coming from Days 1a, 1b and 1c respectively. A number of Day 1c big name pros failed to make the cut, including Joel Dodds, Andrew Scott and Julian Cohen. Leo Boxell, the champion of the APPT Melbourne Main Event in 2011, was eliminated later in the day as well.

The person doing the eliminating was none other than Alicia Sale, a New Zealand native who ended the day’s action at the #1 spot on the overall chip leaderboard. Sale’s chip stack was reduced to just 4,000 before she rebuilt it to nearly 92,000 in dramatic fashion. Sale scored a nut flush on the turn to simultaneously knock out Joshua Juric and Boxell.

The top 10 finishers from Day 1c looked like a who’s-who of local pros, with seven players from New Zealand along with one each from Austria (Octavian Voegele), Australia (Charles Caris) and Estonia (Roland Keiso). The overall top 10 from all three starting flights is hardly more diverse. New Zealanders dominate six of the top seven spots, with Germany’s Marcel Schreiner sneaking into the #6 slot from an excellent performance on Day 1b.

Day 2 kicks off at 12:30 local time. The outright winner of APPT Queenstown will receive just over $94k.