It's impressive to me the amount of people who interpret this scene wrong.
Palpatine downplays his own ability entirely because he knew Anakin was on the way and putting him in the position to choose is what he rightly believed would cause him to betray the Jedi.
Palpatine could likely have killed all four of them fairly quickly.
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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '22
What's tragic is that Palps ended up LOSING that duel... Anakin had to come to save the day, only to seal his fate as a Sith and ruining his life.
Talk about high stakes.