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Queenstown, New Zealand is currently playing host to the second stop of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) this year. The event, which is being held at the SKYCITY Casino, is sponsored by PokerStars.

The tournament event is scheduled to include three separate Day 1 starting flights, the first of which went down yesterday. Although a mere 40 players paid their buy-ins for Day 1a, event organizers are expecting plenty more to arrive today and tomorrow. Queenstown is highly regarded as a premium vacation destination, and it’s likely that plenty of big name pros are electing to see the sights before they settle down at the felt.

Some of the more notable pros who did show up for the first starting day are probably regretting it – Trung Tran, Ryan Hong, Aaron Benton and Joel Feldman among others have already been eliminated. The native New Zealanders emerged as the chip leaders as the day went on, with Jackson Zheng, Koray Turker, and especially Cole Swannack leading the charge. Swannack, who has already amassed over 86,000 chips, got his first taste of APPT success last year when he made it to third place in Macau.

Koray Turker is actually very close behind Swannack with just over 85,000 chips. Turker is undoubtedly hoping to at least repeat the success he found in APPT Melbourne, where he made a deeper run than expected.

Jackson Zheng is close behind as well with a little over 80,000 chips. Zheng earned over 50,000 NZD earlier in 2011 when he took first place in the New Zealand Poker Open.

Fourth place currently belongs to Semesa Brown, an Australian native whose 43k chip stack pales in comparison to the top 3. Other notable players in the top 10 include Wayne Bell, Rachel Bellard, Werner Soames and Harry Kyriacou.