Australian casino operator Crown Resorts saw its half-year profit slump despite celebrating the return of its Asian VIP gamblers.

On Thursday, Crown announced that its revenue hit A$1.78b (US$1.4b) in the six months ending December 31, up 0.8% from the same period one year earlier. Earnings eked out a 0.3% gain to A$400m but net profit after tax (NPAT) slipped 12.4% to A$155.7m.

Using the ‘normalized’ results – a fiction that imagines a world in which VIP gambling win never deviates from a fixed percentage – the company’s earnings improved 11.2% to A$447.7m and NPAT nudged up 1.4% to A$189m. Also, in a normalized world, Crown boss James Packer can gorge on all the ice cream he wants and never gain weight. Just saying.

(To be fair, the statutory year-on-year comparisons are a mess, given that the previous year’s H1 results included Crown’s share of the Melco Resorts & Entertainment (formerly Melco Crown Entertainment) profits, from which Crown divested itself fully last spring.)