Palpatine and the B team
OK, this is not the thread to debate whether Sidious's threw the fight (he didn't). 😠
The question here is how, exactly, Palpatine manages to kill the three Jedi masters the way he does.
Here's a link to the battle. It's technically an AMV, except that doesn't suck:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu_XLDlDWLQ
Now, the novelization describes a pretty badass scene where Palpatine moves with blinding speed, takes out the three masters, and then fights Windu, who eventually sinks into vaapad, and then the two fight with omgwtflol blinding speeds too fast for even Anakin to follow.
Unfortunately, Lucas is an incompetent dumbass, so we instead get a ridiculous set of telegraphed stabs and slashes that the Jedi somehow don't respond to, followed by a brief 2 vs 1 match where the Jedi conveniently time their attacks so Ian McDiarmid will be able to parry their blades at the same time. When Fisto falls, Mace Windu backs through the door with a dumbass open stance that Palpatine just ignores. (on about horrible choreography)
Since the films > novels in the canon hierarchy, we have to accept the movie's version of events, where Palpatine is certainly not using Force speed, or moving particularly fast.
So how does he kill all those Masters?
My theory is that he used the dark side to dull their senses and movement, and had possibly been slowly prepping this after revealing himself to Anakin. We know from...some movie-novel that dueling Force users use the Force to mess up the other's senses, so it's not entirely speculative.