An avid chess player cannot beat top-tier chess software, which is free. Stockfish has a rating of 3000+ and the top player in the world plays at a rating of ~2800
I think that has been mentioned about a million times already, in this thread alone.

At any rate, even if the general idea is right, comparing the rating of a computer chess program with a human player directly doesn't tend to work very well, due to the way ratings are calculated
1 - basically, there aren't enough high profile computer versus human matches for that to provide very accurate information by itself (though, again, it's undisputed that computer engines can be much stronger than human players).
1 - see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_engine#Comparisons, below the engine's table.