In this work, we study the Betti numbers of pinched Veronese rings, by means of the reduced homology of squarefree divisor complexes. We characterize when these rings are Cohen-Macaulay and we study the shape of the Betti tables for the pinched Veronese in the two variables. As a byproduct we obtain information on the linearity of such rings. Moreover, in the last section we compute the canonical modules of the Veronese modules.