Cannabis cup

High Times Cannabis Cup (Amsterdam)

The Amsterdam Cannabis Cup is a cannabis judging and awards event that High Times magazine started in November 1988. This page covers its history, its traditions and where things stand now.

604results on record
1988–2014years in our data
27editions
261matched to strains
Amsterdamlatest location

01Beginnings: a magazine, an editor and a first November

The Cup started with a magazine. Tom Forcade founded High Times, and the first issue came out in the summer of 1974¹. The competition came later, after Steven Hager became editor in 1988¹. Under Hager, the magazine set up the Cup that same year as an awards ceremony in Amsterdam, held around the American Thanksgiving holiday¹. Wikipedia credits Hager as the founder, dates the first Cup to November 1988, and lists Skunk#1 from Cultivator's Choice as the first winner². None of the sources we could open says why Hager and the magazine decided to hold a competition, so we have not guessed.

A note on names: this page is about the Amsterdam edition only. It does not cover the High Times Medical Cannabis Cup, first held in San Francisco in June 2010. It also does not cover the U.S. Cannabis Cup that Rob Robinson and Damn Sam Productions first held in 1995, or the Australian Cannabis Cup in Nimbin, New South Wales². Later U.S. editions, including the New York City Cup announced in 2026, are separate events too⁴.

02The story: a raid, a farewell and a comeback

The Cup was usually held each November in Amsterdam². Then the police got involved. Wikipedia says Dutch police raided the Amsterdam Cup in 2010, but the article it cites for this is dated November 2011 and describes the raid as the first in 24 years. We cannot settle the year from what we read². Wikipedia also says the 2014 Cup looked like Amsterdam's last after 27 years. It gives three reasons: growing uncertainty over Dutch cannabis law, newly legal markets in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the aftermath of the raid. It adds in a brief note that the Cup later came back to Amsterdam, but gives no date². All of this comes from that one article, and we did not find a second source to confirm it.

The company behind the Cup had its own troubles. Trans-High Corporation published High Times from 1974 to 2016. In 2017 Hightimes Holding Corp. took over the company, and that summer a group of investors led by Adam Levin bought the magazine¹. Hager was fired in 2003, hired back, let go again in 2013, and later won a lawsuit claiming the company had cheated him out of his ownership shares¹. Money problems stopped the magazine in 2024. In June 2025, RAW rolling papers founder Josh Kesselman bought it for $3.5 million¹. His announcement says the brand had gone into receivership, and that he paid cash for the magazine, the Cannabis Cups and the assets that went with them³.

03Culture: a festival with a hall of fame

The Amsterdam Cup also had a ceremonial side. Since 1997 the festival has hosted induction ceremonies for the Counterculture Hall of Fame². The inductees named on Wikipedia include Louis Armstrong in 1998, Jack Kerouac in 1999, and Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong in 2007. The Cup's founder, Steven Hager, was inducted in 2012².

We have left out some details for now because we could not check them against an open source. These are how judging and scoring worked, which coffee shops and venues took part, and first-hand accounts of the festival week. We will add them once we can confirm them.

04Now: quiet in Amsterdam, busy elsewhere

The sources we reviewed show no Amsterdam Cannabis Cup in 2025 or 2026, and the Wikipedia article does not mention one². That does not prove nothing happened, and we found nothing linking Amsterdam to the brand's relaunch. The Cup is active elsewhere. Wikipedia lists High Times Cannabis Cups in Northern and Southern California, Denver, Michigan, Seattle, Missouri and Oregon².

On 23 January 2026, a press release said the Cup would come to New York for the first time since the state legalised recreational cannabis in 2021. The release did not give event dates, and it named Matt Stang and the Cannabis Cup team as the people running it⁴. Wikipedia's High Times article says the magazine began publishing again in 2026. We could not confirm this anywhere else¹.

05Future: no Amsterdam plans announced

We found no announced plans, dates or venue for a future Amsterdam Cup. What we do have is Kesselman's June 2025 announcement. It said the Cup series would return with third-party judging and no pay-to-play, and that the first revamped event was expected in early 2026³. It also said the print magazine would come back in limited collectible editions, and that the website would become a hub for cannabis podcasts, experts and community voices. The announcement was framed around the brand's 50 years of history³. It did not mention Amsterdam. Cannabis laws vary a lot between countries and regions, and this page reports events without endorsing them. We will update it if an Amsterdam edition is confirmed.

The results, in our data

CannaLib holds 604 results from this cup across 27 years (1988 to 2014), 261 of them matched to a strain in the catalogue.

Recent first-place strains

Year	Strain	Category	Entrant
2014	Cookies Kush	Coffeeshop Flowers	Barney’s Coffeeshop
2014	Colorado Bubba	Indica by a Seed Company	The Vault Genetics
2014	Tangie Crockett S Cut	Sativa by a Seed Company	Crockett Family Farms
2014	Larry Og	Hybrid by a Seed Company	The Vault Genetics
2014	Cbd Ren	CBD Flowers	House of the Great Gardener
2013	Rollex Og Kush	Coffeeshop Flowers	Green Place
2013	Whitewalker Og	Seed Company Indica	Gold Coast Extracts
2013	Tangie	Seed Company Sativa	Reserva Privada
2013	Somari	Seed Company Hybrid	Soma’s Sacred Seeds
2013	Twizz La	Import Hash	Green Place
2013	Cannatonic	CBD Flowers	Elemental Seeds
2012	Flower Bomb Kush	Cannabis Cup	Green House Coffeeshop
2012	Kosher Kush	Indica Cup	Reserva Privada
2012	Amnesia Haze	Sativa Cup	Soma's Sacred Seeds