I think even Harry at his best would have trouble with Anakin. Anakin is just much faster, much better reflexes. But it's not a bad matchup, I could potentially see it go in Harry's favor in some cases, if he can start with a spell that's very difficult to dodge perhaps.
This is assuming it is a blind match up, if Harry were to know about the abilities of the force and Anakin in particular and could prepare appropriate spells I think he'd have a much better chance, and would win most of the time.
Originally posted by NotAllThatEvil
Wouldn't anakin have similar knowledge and prep, thus nullifying any advantage harry would get?
Not in the way I see it, I think Anakin doesn't really have much room for improvement with prep, he's pretty far at top of his game and there's not a great pool of things he could do differently. The nature of magic in the Harry Potter universe is different though. There are an incredible amount of spells, many that have to be learned through research, that do very different things, so if he knew what kind of powers Anakin has, he could find the most fitting spell.
To expand on that, I don't think that what the poster above me say would work, disregarding that Harry Potter does not really use Avada Kedavra, the way these spells work is that they are similar to a slow gun, at best as fast as a blaster bolt perhaps, and Anakin having amazing reflexes would be able to dodge these, close the gap between them or even choke Harry very quickly. So a standard spell like that would not work, in my opinion, if he had an effective large area spell, and knew that he needs to use it on the other hand that advantage could be negated.
That's just how I see it going in my mind right now though.
Originally posted by NotAllThatEvil
I feel that's a disingenuous approach as it ascribes to harry feats and abilities he does not actually have. Might as well make it an amalgamation of every great hp wizard vs anakin at that point
I see your point, I would not agree with it exactly though. I don't think Harry would have to be as good as Dumbledore, just a few days in studying in the Hogwarts library, like we have seen in many of the movies. My point is more that without knowing the specifics of this it's a bit unclear to me what would happen.
If Harry and Anakin got suddenly teleported into the arena, with no knowledge of each other, and only an imperative to kill, I think Anakin would take it, in that specific scenario, as I said.
Its going to take him more than a few days to learn a plethora of new spells needed to specifically deal with Anakin. Why not have Yoda teach him how to catch energy or Mace Windu teach him Vaapad so he can learn to efficiently use his anger and dark side energy? He never used those powers but they aren't specific to the people who used them and if anyone could learn quickly it would be Anakin.