The antenna selection technology is introduced into the existing uplink Alamouti multi-user MIMO detection for a low hardware cost. A selection criterion maximizing the minimum user signal-to-noise-plus-interference-ratio (SINR) is proposed. To avoid the exhaustive search selection, a fast selection algorithm is further proposed that selects an antenna to maximize the minimum user SINR in each stage. Simulations show the exhaustive search selection achieves almost all the diversity benefit of the full complexity system utilizing all receive antennas and the performance of the fast selection is near to the optimal selection.