In this letter, an adaptive detection scheme for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is proposed. In order to reduce the complexity of the decoding steps, the initial symbol is obtained by a MMSE equalizer and then the symbol ordering is performed by the channel state. After the received symbols are divided according to the channel state, some of the symbols are detected by using the MMSE detector with low complexity. With cancelation processing, the remainder symbols are detected for the K-best detector. The proposed adaptive detection scheme combines the MMSE and K-best detector based on the channel state. Therefore, the proposed adaptive detector achieves a good performance.