I've put my studded tires away about two weeks ago, even though there are still regular patches of ice along my commuting route. For the past two weeks or so we had a lot of melting going on during the day and then at night everything would freeze. I've been riding my fixie with skinny CX knobbies on ice, including black ice and never crashed, not even once. There were few situations where things got really scary but I managed to stay up without crashing. Yes I had to slow down a lot, use a lot of caution and be extremely careful...but it's possible to ride ice without studs and not crash but it's defenitely not the same as riding with studded tires.