Why would my program be skipping if statements with true conditions?

I am working on a board game, and want to place my pieces in the middle first. I am writing if statements if (middle spot is empty), which is always true at the beginning of the game with an empty board. yet my function skips these statement and goes straight to a for loop that i want for the middle part of the game. does anyone know why this could be? i'm coding in eclipse. thanks

I've tried replacing my if/elseif statements with while loops, and changing up all kinds of stuff but nothing seems to work.

I know for a fact my statements are true in the beginning of the game, and the if statement is skipped nonetheless.